THE   BEACON   BIOGRAPHIES 

EDITED    BY 

M.  A.  DEWOLFE  HOWE 


NATHANIEL    HAWTHORNE 

BY 

ANNIE   FIELDS 


B 

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NATHANIEL   HAWTHORNE 


BY 


ANNIE  FIELDS 


BOSTON 

SMALL,   MAYNARD   &  COMPANY 
MDCCCXCIX 


Copyright, 
By  Small,  Maynard  &f  Company 

{Incorporated} 


Entered  at  Stationers'  Hall 

•/  i'VSU 


Press  of 

George  H.  Ellis,  Boston 


The  photogravure  used  as  a  frontispiece 
to  this  volume  is  from  a  photograph  taken 
about  1862,  by  J.  W.  Black,  Boston.  The 
present  engraving  is  by  John  Andrew  & 
Son,  Boston. 


1(14505 


BY   THE   EDITOE. 

It  is  necessary  only  to  say,  in  introducing 
this  little  volume,  that  Messrs.  Houghton, 
Mifflin  &  Co.  have  given  courteous  permis 
sion  to  quote  with  freedom  from  the  books 
relating  to  Hawthorne  which  they  publish. 
The  reader  will  see  that  the  quotations  are 
made  largely  from  Hawthorne9  s  own  words, 
ivith  the  purpose  of  letting  him  speak  as 
fully  as  possible  for  himself.  The  reader 
who  is  familiar  with  Yesterdays  with 
Authors,  by  James  T.  Fields,  will  observe, 
moreover,  that  certain  letters  from  Haw 
thorne  to  Mr.  Fields  are  not  taken  from 
that  book.  They  are  printed  here  for  the 
first  time. 
SEPTEMBER,  1899 


CHBONOLOGY. 

1804 

July  4.  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  was  born 
at  Salem,  Mass. 

1808 

His  father  died  when  away  at  sea,  in 
Surinam  5  and  the  family  went  to  live 
with  his  maternal  grandfather,  Eichard 
Manning. 

1813-18 

Lived  with  his  mother  and  two  sisters 
near  Baymond,  Maine. 

1818 
Was  at  school  in  Salem. 

1820 
His  family  returned  to  Salem. 

1821-25 

At  Bowdoin  College  with  Longfellow, 
Franklin  Pierce,  and  Horatio  Bridge. 

1828 

Published  anonymously  Fanshawe,  a 
Tale. 


x  CHBONOLOGY 

1828-36 

Lived  quietly  in  Salem,  writing  for  an. 
nuals  and  magazines,  and  preparing  the 
way  for  the  fame  to  come  later. 

1836 

March-August.  Edited  the  last  six  num 
bers  of  the  second  volume  of  the  Ameri 
can  Magazine  of  Useful  Knowledge. 

1837 

Published  Twice-told  Tales. 
July.  The  book  was  appreciatively  re 
viewed    by    Longfellow    in    the    North 
American  Review. 

1839 

Became  engaged  to  Miss  Sophia  Pea- 
body.  Was  appointed  weigher  and 
gauger  in  the  Boston  Custom-house 
under  George  Bancroft. 

1841 

Lived  at  Brook  Farm,  West  Eoxbury. 
Published  Grandfathers  Chair ,  Famous 
Old  People,  and  Liberty  Tree, 


CHEONOLOGY  xi 

1842 

July  9.  Marriage  to  Sophia  Peabody. 
August.  Settled  in  the  "Old  Manse "  at 
Concord.     Published  second  volume  of 
Twice-told  Tales,  and  Biographical  Stories 
for  Children. 

1844 
March  3.  His  daughter  Una  was  born. 

1845 

Edited  the  Journal  of  an  African  Cruiser, 
by  his  friend  Bridge. 

1846 

Published  Mosses  from  an  Old  Manse. 
Eemoved  to  Salem. 

March  23.  Eeceived  the  appointment  of 
surveyor  in  the  Custom-house  at  Salem. 
June  22.  His  son  Julian  born  in  Boston. 

1849 

Lost  his  office  in  the  Custom-house. 
July  31.  His  mother  died  in  his  house. 

1850 

Published  The  Scarlet  Letter.  Eernoved 
to  Lenox,  leaving  Salem  forever. 


xii  CHRONOLOGY 

1850-51 
Wrote  The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables. 

1851 

Published  The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables, 
True  Stories  from  History  and  Biography, 
and  The  Snow  Image,  and  Other  Tales. 
May  20.    His    second    daughter,    Rose, 
born. 

1851-52 

Winter.  Moved  his  family  to  West  New 
ton  while  looking  for  a  house  to  buy. 

1852 

June.  Bought  The  Wayside  in  Concord, 
and  moved  into  it.  Published  The 
Blithedale  Romance  and  A  Wonder-book 
for  Children. 

September.  Published  a  Life  of  Franklin 
Pierce. 

1853 

Published  Tanglewood  Tales. 
March.  Nominated  and  confirmed  Amer 
ican  consul  at  Liverpool. 
July.  Sailed  for  England. 


CHEONOLOGY  xiii 

1854 

Eepublished  Mosses  from  an  Old  Manse, 
revised  and  enlarged. 

1855 
Visited  the  "Lake  Country.77 

1857 
Fall.  Resigned  his  office  as  consul. 

1858 

January  3.  Left  London  with  his  family 
for  a  two  years'  tour  on  the  Continent. 
February-May.  Lived  in  Eome. 
Summer.  Spent  in   and    near  Florence. 
Began  The  Marble  Faun. 

1858-59 
Winter.  Lived  in  Eome. 

1859 
Spring.  Eeturned  to  England  to  write. 

1860 

March.  Finished  and  published  The  Mar 
ble  Faun. 
June.  Eeturned  home  to  America. 


xiv  CHBONOLOGY 

1862 

February.    Took   a  trip   to  Washington 
and  into  Virginia  in   the  track  of  the 
armies. 
March.  Eeturned  to  Concord. 

1863 
Published  Our  Old  Home. 

1864 

May  14.  Left  Concord  with  Franklin 
Pierce  for  a  tour  in  Northern  New  Eng 
land. 

May  19.  Nathaniel  Hawthorne  died  at 
Plymouth,  N.H. 

1868 

Passages  from  the  American  Note-books 
published. 

1870 

Passages  from  the  English  Note-books  pub 
lished. 

1871 

Passages  from  tJie  French  and  Italian  Note 
books  published. 

1872 
Septimius  Felton  published. 


CHBOSTOLOGY  xv 

1876 

The  Dolliver  Romance,  and  Other  Pieces, 
and  Fanshawe,  and  Other  Pieces  (now 
first  collected ),  published. 

1877 

Legends  of  New  England,  Legends  of  the 
Province  House,  Tales  of  the  White  Hills, 
and  A  Virtuoso7  s  Collection,  and  Other 
Tales,  published. 

1883 

Dr.  Grimshawe's  Secret,  Sketches  and 
Studies,  Tales,  Sketches,  and  Other  Papers, 
and  Complete  Works  published. 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE 


NATHANIEL   HAWTHORNE. 
I. 


IN  the  year  1804, 
was  born,  Salem,  Ms  birthplace,  was  a 
flourishing  town.  Cultivated  persons 
were  living  there,  and  many  of  his  con 
temporaries  were  men  and  women  accus 
tomed  to  the  finest  amenities  of  social 
life. 

His  father,  a  lover  of  books  and  a 
silent  man,  was  a  sea-captain,  like  so 
many  of  the  most  respectable  men  of 
that  period.  He  died  at  Surinam  of 
fever,  when  he  was  only  little  more  than 
thirty  years  of  age,  leaving  his  wife  with 
three  children  to  weep  for  him.  She 
was  only  twenty-eight  when  he  died  ;  but 
she  shut  herself  into  her  own  room, 
where  she  remained  for  the  greater  part 
of  the  forty  subsequent  years  of  her  ex 
istence.  Hawthorne  was  an  only  son, 
adored  by  his  mother  ;  but,  deprived  of 
society  by  her  hermit-like  habits,  he 


2  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE 
grew  up  a  lonely  child.  Dr.  Worcester, 
the  compiler  of  the  American  Dictionary 
bearing  his  iiame?  was  Hawthorne's  de 
voted  instructor/  There  was  probably 
no  one  his  superior  at  that  time,  but  the 
cheerful  habit  of  a  continuous  school  and 
school-boy  companionship  was  never  a 
part  of  Hawthorne's  experience  and 
happiness. 

In  a  brief  autobiography  he  says  of 
these  early  days  :  — 

"I  was  born  in  the  town  of  Salem, 
Massachusetts,  in  a  house  built  by  my 
grandfather,  who  was  a  maritime  per 
sonage.  The  old  household  estate  was 
in  another  part  of  the  town,  and  had 
descended  in  the  family  ever  since  the 
settlement  of  the  country ;  but  this  old 
man  of  the  sea  exchanged  it  for  a  lot  of 
land  near  the  wharves  and  convenient 
to  his  business,  where  he  built  the  house 
(which  is  still  standing)  and  laid  out  a 
garden,  where  I  rolled  on  a  grass  plot 
under  an  apple-tree  and  picked  abun 
dant  currants.  .  .  . 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE  3 
"One  of  the  peculiarities  of  my  boy 
hood  was  a  grievous  disinclination  to 
go  to  school ;  and  (Providence  favoring 
me  in  this  natural  repugnance)  I  never 
did  go  half  as  much  as  other  boys,  partly 
owing  to  delicate  health  (which  I  made 
the  most  of  for  the  purpose)  and  partly 
because,  much  of  the  time,  there  were 
no  schools  within  reach. " 

Hawthorne's  lameness  when  a  boy  of 
nine  years,  the  result  of  accident  in  a 
game  of  bat  and  ball,  threatened  at  one 
time  to  be  permanent.  For  three  years 
he  was  left  much  to  his  own  devices  with 
respect  to  reading  and  study.  His  sis 
ter  Elizabeth  says,  in  a  letter  written  to 
his  children,  "Undoubtedly,  he  would 
have  wanted  many  of  the  qualities 
which  distinguished  him  in  after  life  if 
his  genius  had  not  been  thus  shielded 
in  childhood.7' 

Perhaps  it  was  with  some  thought  of 
recovering  the  boy's  perfect  strength  at 
this  time  that  the  family  went  away  far 


4  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE 
into  the  wilderness  to  a  place  owned  by 
his  uncle,  near  Baymond,  on  Sebago 
Lake.  It  was  of  the  life  at  Sebago  that 
Hawthorne  chiefly  loved  to  speak  in  his 
later  days.  His  mother  and  sisters  en 
joyed  the  freedom  and  the  solitude  ap 
parently  as  well  as  he ;  for,  when  his 
mother  determined  to  send  him  back  to 
Salem  to  prepare  for  college,  the  family 
remained  behind  until  1820,  the  year 
previous  to  Hawthorne's  entrance  into 
Bowdoin  College.  "The  immense  State 
of  Maine,  in  the  year  1818, "  writes 
Henry  James,  "  must  have  had  an  even 
more  magnificently  natural  character 
than  it  possesses  at  the  present  day; 
and  the  uncle's  dwelling,  in  conse 
quence  of  being  in  a  little  smarter 
style  than  the  primitive  structures  that 
surrounded  it,  was  known  by  the  vil 
lagers  as  '  Manning7  s  Folly. ? 7  ?  Haw 
thorne  spoke  of  the  place  to  a  friend 
later  in  life  as  the  one  where  "I  first  got 
my  cursed  habits  of  solitude"  ;  but,  how- 


NATHANIEL  HAWTIIOEXE      5 

ever  the  loveliness  of  Nature  may  have 
confirmed  him  in  the  power  of  remote 
living,  we  have  seen  how  he  had  been 
accustomed  in  the  world  of  a  large  town 
to  live  apart  from  men  in  a  way  much 
more  difficult  to  support.  "I  lived/' 
he  said,  ' i  in  Maine  like  a  bird  of  the  air, 
so  perfect  was  the  freedom  I  enjoyed." 

Hawthorne  wrote  to  his  sister  Eliza 
beth,  while  she  was  still  in  this  paradise 
and  he  in  Salem  at  the  home  of  one  of 
his  kind  uncles  :  — 

"SEPT.  28,  1819. 

"Dear  Sister, —  ...  I  do  not  know 
what  to  do  with  n^self  here.  I  shall 
never  be  contented  here  I  am  sure.  I 
now  go  to  a  five-dollar  school, — I  that 
have  been  to  a  ten- dollar  one,  i  O  Lucifer, 
son  of  the  morning,  how  art  thou  fallen! ' 
I  wish  I  was  but  in  Raymond,  and  I 
should  be  happy.  But  '  'twas  light  that 
ne'er  shall  shine  again  on  life's  dull 
stream.'  I  have  read  Waverlcy,  The  Mys- 


6     ISTATHAOTEL  HAWTHOBKE 

teries  of  Udolpho,  The  Adventures  of  Fer 
dinand  Count  Fathom,  Roderick  Random, 
and  the  first  volume  of  The  Arabian 
Nights."  .  .  . 

And  to  his  mother  he  says  :  "  I  dreamed 
the  other  night  that  I  was  walking  by 
the  Sebago,  and,  when  I  awoke,  was  so 
angry  at  finding  it  all  a  delusion,  that  I 
gave  Uncle  Eobert  (who  sleeps  with  me) 
a  most  horrible  kick.  I  don't  read  so 
much  now  as  I  did,  because  I  am  more 
taken  up  in  studying.  I  am  quite  recon 
ciled  to  going  to  college,  since  I  am  to 
spend  the  vacations  with  you.  Yet  four 
years  of  the  best  part  of  my  life  is  a  great 
deal  to  throw  away.  I  have  not  yet  con 
cluded  what  profession  I  shall  have.  The 
being  a  minister  is  of  course  out  of  the 
question.  I  should  not  think  that  even 
you  could  desire  to  choose  so  dull  a  way 
of  life.  Oh,  no,  mother,  I  was  not  born 
to  vegetate  forever  in  one  place,  and  to 
live  and  die  as  calm  and  as  tranquil  as  — 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  7 
a  puddle  of  water.  As  to  lawyers,  there 
are  so  many  of  them  already  that  one- 
half  of  them  (upon  a  moderate  calcula 
tion)  are  in  a  state  of  actual  starvation. 
A  physician,  then,  seems  to  be  'Hobson's 
choice '  ;  but  yet  I  should  not  like  to  live 
by  the  diseases  and  infirmities  of  my  fel 
low-creatures.  And  it  would  weigh  very 
heavily  on  my  conscience,  in  the  course 
of  my  practice,  if  I  should  chance  to  send 
any  unlucky  patient  ad  inferum,  which, 
being  interpreted,  is  Ho  the  realms 
below.'  Oh  that  I  were  rich  enough  to 
live  without  a  profession!  What  do  you 
think  of  my  becoming  an  author,  and  re 
lying  for  support  upon  my  pen  !  Indeed, 
I  think  the  illegibility  of  my  handwrit 
ing  is  very  author-like.  How  proud  you 
would  be  to  see  my  works  praised  by  the 
reviewers,  as  equal  to  the  proudest  pro 
ductions  of  the  scribbling  sons  of  John 
Bull !  But  authors  are  always  poor 
devils,  and  therefore  Satan  may  take 
them.  I  am  in  the  same  predicament  as 


8      NATHANIEL   HAWTHOEKE 
the  honest  gentleman  in  Espriellctfs  Let 
ters  :  — 

1 1  am  an  Englishman,  and  naked  I  stand 

here, 

A- musing  in  my  mind  what  garment  I 
shall  wear. ? 

.  .  .  Your  affectionate  son, 

"NATHL.  HATHORNE. 
"  Do  not  show  this  letter.'7 

He  seems  to  have  written  to  his  mother 
out  of  the  fulness  of  his  heart,  as  he  sel 
dom,  if  ever,  allowed  himself  to  do  with 
any  one  else  ;  and  yet  there  is  a  frankness 
in  all  his  friendly  letters  quite  at  vari- 
ence  with  his  restricted  power  of  expres 
sion  face  to  face. 

At  Bowdoin  College,  Hawthorne  found 
three  lifelong  friends  :  Longfellow,  whom 
he  knew  then  but  slightly ;  Franklin 
Pierce ;  and  Horatio  Bridge.  To  the 
latter  he  addressed  the  beautiful  prefa 
tory  letter  affixed  to  The  Snoio  Image, 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE      9 

and  Other  Tales,  now  incorporated  in  the 
Twice-told  Tales.  He  writes:  "If  any 
body  is  responsible  at  this  day  for  my 
being  an  author,  it  is  yourself.  I  know 
not  whence  your  faith  came ;  but  while 
we  were  lads  together  at  a  country  col 
lege,  gathering  blueberries  in  study 
hours  under  those  tall  academic  pines 
or  watching  the  great  logs  as  they  tumbled 
along  the  current  of  the  Androscoggin, 
or  shooting  pigeons  or  grey  squirrels  in 
the  woods,  or  bat- fowling  in  the  summer 
twilight,  or  catching  trout  in  that 
shadowy  little  stream  which,  I  suppose, 
is  still  wandering  riverward  through  the 
forest,  though  you  and  I  will  never  cast 
a  line  in  it  again,  —  two  idle  lads,  in 
short  (as  we  need  not  fear  to  acknowl 
edge  now),  doing  a  hundred  things  the 
Faculty  never  heard  of,  or  else  it  had 
been  the  worse  for  us, — still  it  was  your 
prognostic  of  your  friend's  destiny  that 
he  was  to  be  a  writer  of  fiction." 

"A  very  pretty  picture,"  as  Henry 


10   NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE 

James  says  ;  "  but  it  is  a  picture  of  boys 
at  school  rather  thau  that  of  Englishmen 
of  the  same  age  at  Oxford  and  Cam 
bridge,  the  advantages  of  which  great 
institutions  Hawthorne  could  never 
know.  .  .  .  Bowdoin  College  at  this 
time/7  continues  Mr.  James,  "was  a 
homely,  simple,  frugal,  '  country  col 
lege'  of  the  old-fashioned  American 
stamp,  exerting  within  its  limits  a 
civilizing  influence,  working  amid  the 
forests  and  the  lakes,  the  log  houses  and 
the  clearings,  towards  the  amenities  and 
humanities  and  other  collegiate  graces, 
and  offering  a  very  sufficient  education 
to  the  future  lawyers,  merchants,  clergy 
men,  politicians,  and  editors  of  the  very 
active  and  knowledge-loving  community 
that  supported  it." 

In  such  an  atmosphere,  virtues  which 
were  Hawthorne's,  of  probity  and  truth 
fulness,  found  opportunity  to  make  them 
selves  evident.  A  letter  addressed  by 
the  president  of  Bowdoin  College  to  his 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE  11 
mother  asks  her  co-operation  "in  the 
attempt  to  induce  your  son  faithfully  to 
observe  the  laws  of  this  institution, ?  7  and 
adds,  "Perhaps  he  might  not  have 
gamed,  were  it  not  for  the  influence  of  a 
student  we  have  dismissed  from  college. ?  ? 
This  letter  was  apparently  sent  back  for 
Hawthorne  to  read,  who  replies:  "I 
was  fully  as  willing  to  play  as  the  person 
he  suspects  of  having  enticed  me,  and 
would  have  been  influenced  by  no  one. 
I  have  a  great  mind  to  commence  play 
ing  again,  merely  to  show  him  that  I 
scorn  to  be  seduced  by  another  into  any 
thing  wrong.7' 

One  thing  may  be  observed  with  toler 
able  clearness, — that  Hawthorne  was  to 
find  small  external  aid  to  education. 
The  true  preparation  for  the  career 
which  already  lay  duskily  outlined  be 
fore  him  came  from  his  unusual  power 
of  reading.  It  is  true  that  he  found 
Hume's  History  dull,  and  laid  it  aside 
for  another  season ;  but  French  and 


12   NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE 
English  literature,   generally  speaking, 
he  gradually  made  his  own. 

His  impatience  to  get  home  for  his 
college  vacations  already  shows  the 
strong  and  sometimes  wilful  determina 
tion  which  marked  his  character.  He 
writes  to  his  sister  Louisa,  "It  is  expe 
dient  for  me  to  return  to  Salem  imme 
diately  7 '  ;  and,  after  giving  his  reasons, 
he  adds :  "If  you  are  at  a  loss  for  an 
excuse,  say  that  mother  is  out  of  health 
or  Uncle  Robert  is  going  on  a  journey  on 
account  of  his  health  and  wishes  me  to 
attend  him,  ...  or,  if  none  of  these  ex 
cuses  suit  you,  write  and  order  me  to 
come  home  without  any.  If  you  do  not, 
I  shall  certainly  forge  a  letter ;  for  I 
WILL  be  at  home  within  a  week.'7 

Perhaps  these  examples  do  not  pre 
cisely  illustrate  what  Mr.  Fields,  in  his 
Yesterdays  with  Authors,  calls  the  "stern 
probity "  of  Hawthorne,  nor  his  truth 
fulness  ;  but  he  was  still  young  and  wil 
ful.  That  the  virtues  of  truth  and 


NATHANIEL   HAWTHORNE   13 

honesty  were  his  in  a  marked  degree 
may  be  seen  constantly  in  his  future 
career.  He  never  possessed  a  super 
abundance  of  money,  but  no  temptation 
ever  lured  him  into  buying,  or  letting  any 
member  of  his  family  buy,  anything 
which  he  could  not  pay  for  at  once.  He 
practised  no  self-deception  upon  this 
head,  never  fancying  that  his  books 
should  bring  more  money  than  the  mar 
ket  for  them  warranted,  and  never  mort 
gaging  his  brains  in  advance. 

Hawthorne  was  of  age  when  he  left 
college  with  the  determination,  as  we 
have  seen,  of  looking  about  him  before 
deciding  positively  upon  his  choice  of  a 
profession ;  but  no  one  could  have  fore 
seen,  least  of  all  himself,  the  solitary 
condition  in  which  he  was  to  pass  the 
next  twelve  or  fourteen  years  in  his 
mother's  house  in  Salem.  He  could  not 
be  called  idle,  though,  as  his  son  Julian 
says,  "  there  was  an  indolence  in  his  nat 
ure  such  as,  by  the  mercy  of  Providence, 


14   NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE 

is  not  seldom  found  to  mark  the  early 
years  of  those  who  have  some  great  mis 
sion  to  perform  in  the  world ' ?  ;  yet  he 
set  himself  sedulously  to  his  task  of  com 
position.  He  tried  his  hand  at  verse, 
but  soon  told  his  sister  Elizabeth  there 
would  be  no  more  of  that.  At  the  same 
time  he  was  writing  a  book  called  Seven 
Tales  of  my  Native  Land,  of  which  his 
sister  said,  "I  read  these  tales,  and 
liked  them."  Hawthorne  carried  them, 
he  tells  us,  to  seventeen  publishers  un 
successfully.  Surely,  not  an  encourag 
ing  beginning  for  a  young  author  !  He 
persevered,  however,  and  wrote  a  con 
secutive  tale  called  Fanshawe,  which 
Miss  Hawthorne  liked  less  well  than  the 
Seven  Tales;  but  Hawthorne  was  de 
termined  to  publish  it,  which  he  did 
in  Boston,  "  paying  one  hundred  dol 
lars  for  the  purpose."  It  must  have 
had  a  small  circulation,  because  Haw 
thorne  was  very  successful  in  destroy 
ing  it  later,  hardly  more  than  six  copies 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE  15 
being  now  known  to  exist.  Mr. 
Lathrop,  the  son-in-law  of  Hawthorne, 
gives  a  synopsis  of  and  extracts  from  the 
tale ;  but  the  author  wrote  once  to  Mr. 
Fields:  "You  make  an  inquiry  about 
some  supposed  former  publication  of 
mine.  I  cannot  be  sworn  to  make  cor 
rect  answers  as  to  all  the  literary  or  other 
follies  of  my  nonage,  and  I  earnestly 
recommend  you  not  to  brush  away  the 
dust  that  may  have  gathered  over  them. 
Whatever  might  do  me  credit  you  may 
be  pretty  sure  I  should  be  ready  enough 
to  bring  forward.  Anything  else  it  is 
our  mutual  interest  to  conceal ;  and,  so 
far  from  assisting  your  researches  in  that 
direction,  I  especially  enjoin  it  on  you, 
my  dear  friend,  not  to  read  any  unac 
knowledged  page  that  you  may  suppose 
to  be  mine." 

The  copy  of  Fanshawe  in  the  possession 
of  Mr.  Fields  was  put  away  and  jealously 
guarded ;  but  others  have  appeared, 
from  which  the  gist  of  the  book  has  been 


16  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBXE 
given  to  the  world.  There  is  one  pas 
sage  quoted  by  Hawthorne's  son-in-law 
which  has  a  beauty  all  its  own  and  a 
distinctly  autobiographical  interest.  It 
is  as  follows:  "He  called  up  the  years 
that,  even  at  his  early  age,  he  had  spent 
in  solitary  study,  in  conversation  with 
the  dead,  while  he  had  scorned  to  mingle 
with  the  living  world  or  to  be  actuated 
by  any  of  its  motives.  Fanshawe  had 
hitherto  deemed  himself  unconnected 
with  the  world,  unconcerned  in  its  feel 
ings  and  uninfluenced  by  it  in  any  of  his 
pursuits.  In  this  respect  he  probably 
deceived  himself.  If  his  inmost  heart 
could  have  been  laid  open,  there  would 
have  been  discovered  that  dream  of  un 
dying  fame,  which,  dream  as  it  is,  is 
more  powerful  than  a  thousand  reali 
ties.  " 

It  appears  that  he  had  not  yet  burned 
the  Seven  Tales,  which  was  their  ultimate 
fate,  when  he  set  himself  to  the  task  of 
writing  Fanshawe.  The  publishers  had 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE  17 
been  so  undecided  about  the  first  book 
that  Hawthorne  concluded  to  write  this 
continuous  tale,  which  he  hoped,  alas ! 
might  have  better  success. 

Meanwhile  he  seems  to  have  deter 
mined  to  support  himself  by  his  pen, 
and  he  was  willing  to  accept  anything 
that  offered.  He  entered  into  corre 
spondence  with  S.  G.  Goodrich  ("  Peter 
Parley  "  )  and  other  publishers,  and  took 
advice  of  his  friends  Bridge,  Pierce,  and 
Cilley.  The  result  seems  to  have  been 
that  Hawthorne  did  a  great  deal  of 
work  for  very  little  money.  The  Twice- 
told  Tales  were  begun,  and  some  of  them 
were  printed  in  the  annuals  of  the  day. 
But  the  Tales  were  not  issued  in  a  vol 
ume  until  his  friend  Bridge  went  to 
Goodrich  in  1836,  and  offered  to  bear 
the  pecuniary  risks  himself. 

This  long  period  of  twelve  or  fourteen 
years,  which  was  the  formative  period, 
as  it  proved,  of  Hawthorne's  genius, 
wears  but  a  dreary  aspect  to  us  who 


18  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE 
look  upon  it,  and  remember  the  natural 
stirrings  of  youth.  "He  was  poor,  he 
was  solitary, "  writes  Mr.  James  in  his 
admirable  analysis,  "and  he  undertook 
to  devote  himself  to  literature  in  a  com 
munity  in  which  the  interest  in  litera 
ture  was  yet  of  the  smallest.  ...  Of  the 
actual  aridity  of  that  time  the  young 
man  must  have  had  a  painful  conscious 
ness  :  he  never  lost  the  impression  of  it. 
.  .  .  The  development  of  Hawthorne's 
mind  was  not,  however,  towards  sadness. 
I  should  be  inclined  to  go  still  further, 
and  say  that  his  mind  proper  —  his 
mind  in  so  far  as  it  was  a  repository  of 
opinions  and  articles  of  faith  —  had  no 
development  that  it  is  of  especial  im 
portance  to  look  into.  What  had  a 
development  was  his  imagination, —  that 
delicate  and  penetrating  imagination 
which  was  always  at  play,  always  enter 
taining  itself  .  .  .  among  the  shadows 
and  substructions,  the  dark -based  pillars 
and  supports  of  our  moral  nature.  Be- 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE  19 
neath  this  movement  and  ripple  of  Ms 
imagination,  as  free  and  spontaneous  as 
that  of  the  sea-surface,  lay  dimly  his 
personal  affections.  These  were  solid 
and  strong ;  but,  according  to  my  im 
pression,  they  had  the  place  very  much 
to  themselves.  ... 

"  When  we  think  of  what  the  condi 
tions  of  intellectual  life,  of  taste,  must 
have  been  in  a  small  New  England  town 
fifty  years  ago  ;  and  when  we  think  of 
a  young  man  of  beautiful  genius,  with 
a  love  of  literature  and  romance,  of  the 
picturesque,  of  style  and  form  and  color, 
trying  to  make  a  career  for  himself  in 
the  midst  of  them, —  compassion  for  the 
young  man  becomes  our  dominant  sen 
timent,  and  we  see  the  large  dry  village 
picture  in  perhaps  almost  too  hard  a 
light.  It  seems  to  me,  then,  that  it  was, 
possibly,  a  blessing  for  Hawthorne  that 
he  was  not  expansive  and  inquisitive, 
that  he  lived  much  to  himself  and  asked 
but  little  of  his  milieu.  .  American 


20  NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE 
life  had  begun  to  constitute  itself  from 
the  foundations ;  it  had  begun  to  be, 
simply:  it  was  an  immeasurable  dis 
tance  from  having  begun  to  enjoy.  I 
imagine  there  was  no  appreciable  group 
of  people  in  New  England  at  that  time 
proposing  to  itself  to  enjoy  life  :  this  was 
not  an  undertaking  for  which  any  pro 
vision  had  been  made  or  to  which  any 
encouragement  was  offered.  Hawthorne 
must  have  vaguely  entertained  some 
such  design  upon  destiny ;  but  he  must 
have  felt  that  his  success  would  have  to 
depend  wholly  upon  his  own  ingenuity. 
I  say  he  must  have  proposed  to  himself 
to  enjoy,  simply  because  he  proposed  to 
be  an  artist,  and  because  this  enters 
inevitably  into  the  artist's  scheme. " 

After  the  destruction  of  the  Seven 
Tales,  and  the  futile  publication,  as  it 
proved,  of  Fanshawe  and  all  his  ed 
iting  and  minor  writing,  fame  and  some 
definite  light  upon  his  future  looked  as 
far  away  as  ever.  This  light  needed  to 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  21 
come  in  the  form  of  sufficient  response 
from  the  public  to  give  him  daily  bread 
and  a  fillip  to  his  natural  spirits  to  keep 
them  from  sinking.  His  mode  of  life 
was  probably  the  one  to  nourish  the  del 
icate  imagination  which  was  in  him ; 
and  it  is  likely  that  in  some  dim  way  he 
was  willing  to  accept  it  to  this  end. 

"He  seldom  chose  to  walk  in  the 
town  except  at  night.  ...  In  summer 
he  was  up  shortly  after  sunrise,  and 
would  go  down  to  bathe  in  the  sea.  .  .  . 
'Grudge  me  not  the  day/  he  says  in 
"Footprints  by  the  Seashore,'  < that  has 
been  spent  in  seclusion  which  yet  was 
not  solitude,  since  the  great  sea  has 
been  my  companion.'  Speaking  else 
where  of  one  of  his  evening  walks  at 
this  period,  he  writes  :  '  In  the  pure  and 
bracing  air  I  became  all  soul,  and  felt  as 
if  I  could  climb  the  sky  and  run  a  race 
along  the  Milky  Way.'  "  Such  a  nature 
as  Hawthorne's,  drinking  thus  at  the 
great  fountain  of  eternal  life,  silences 


22  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKSTE 
any  thought  of  pity.  There  were  sad 
moments  of  return  to  sublunary  things, 
but  he  had  seen  the  divine  light  and 
touched  the  divine  hand ;  and  to  one 
who  has  known  the  source  of  man's 
great  hope  the  world  is  never  quite  the 
same  as  it  would  appear  to  be  to  other 
men. 

But  Hawthorne  was  to  become  an 
author  and  to  bring  his  secret  light  into 
other  minds.  For  this  purpose  he  was 
eager  to  make  careful  studies  of  exter 
nal  things.  His  journals,  the  portion 
called  later  his  American  Note-books, 
begin  at  this  time,  and  are  filled  with 
minute  observations.  They  seldom  refer 
to  his  own  feelings  or  emotions  or  history. 
They  remind  one  rather  of  a  painter's 
sketch-book,  or  they  are  like  the  mem 
oranda  a  poet  might  make  if  he  chose  to 
write  down  suggestions  to  illustrate  by 
the  things  of  earth  some  story  of  the  un 
seen.  Yet  they  are  again  unlike  these, 
for  they  are  prepared  with  infinite  care 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  23 
in  the  expression.  Longfellow  wrote  in 
his  own  journal  respecting  them :  "  Eead 
Hawthorne's  Note-books.  If  they  had 
been  prepared  for  printing,  they  would 
hardly  have  been  better.7' 

Meanwhile,  although  Hawthorne 
shunned  the  fashionable  and  even  the 
kindly  and  intelligent  society  about 
him,  being  in  no  spirit  of  give  and  take, 
he  sometimes  went  to  the  seaside  tavern, 
and  sat  among  the  fisher  people  and  lis 
tened  to  their  talk.  He  always  loved 
opportunities  of  listening  to  the  plain 
talk  of  plain  men. 

He  not  infrequently  made  short  jour 
neys, —  once  with  his  uncle,  Samuel 
Manning,  through  a  part  of  the  Con 
necticut  Valley,  where  he  seems  to  have 
found  the  groundwork  for  his  "  Seven 
Vagabonds."  He  founds  his  claims  to 
be  of  their  society  upon  "the  free  mind 
that  preferred  its  own  folly  to  another's 
wisdom ;  the  open  spirit  that  found  com 
panions  everywhere  $  above  all,  the  rest- 


24   NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE 

less  impulse  that  had  so  often  made  me 
wretched  in  the  midst  of  enjoyments." 
One  by  one  his  little  masterpieces 
which  were  to  make  the  volumes  of  the 
Twice-told  Tales  were  written,  and  either 
laid  aside  or  sent  to  some  Annual  or 
Token. 

Hawthorne's  biographers  have  made 
careful  studies  of  the  various  experi 
ences  from  which  his  stories  grew.  The 
sensitive  condition  of  his  mind,  quick 
ened  by  his  recluse  habits,  allowed 
him  to  receive  impressions  on  every 
hand.  One  of  the  saddest  seems  to 
have  been  the  death  of  his  college 
friend,  Cilley,  who  was  killed  in  a  duel 
with  Wise.  It  appears  that  Hawthorne 
had  challenged  a  young  man  and  a 
friend  in  Salem  a  short  time  before,  the 
cause  being  some  false  representations 
made  by  a  pretty  young  woman,  a  mu 
tual  acquaintance.  Hawthorne's  friend 
laughed  at  the  idea  of  a  duel,  and  ex 
plained  the  false  character  of  the  girl. 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  25 
But  Cilley  knew  of  Hawthorne's  readi 
ness  to  fight,  and,  when  a  real  cause 
presented  itself,  speedily  accepted  the 
challenge  of  Wise,  "in  order  to  put 
down  the  tyranny  of  fire- eating  South 
erners."  The  result  was  that  Cilley 
was  slain.  Hawthorne  was  crushed  by 
the  idea  that  his  bad  example  had  mis 
led  his  friend ;  and,  in  the  brief  tale 
called  " Fancy's  Show-box:  A  Moral 
ity,"  he  embodies  something  of  the 
suffering  that  was  really  his. 

There  were  few  signs  of  immaturity 
in  Hawthorne's  work  from  the  time 
he  began  to  write  the  Twice-told  Tales. 
The  suffering  of  deferred  hope,  the  con 
stant  struggle  to  make  evident  the  spirit 
that  was  in  him,  had  already  given 
steadiness  to  his  hand.  Kow  and  then 
a  confidence  creeps  into  the  Note-book: 
"  Every  individual  has  a  place  in  the 
world,  and  is  important  to  it  in  some 
respects,  whether  he  chooses  to  be  so 
or  not." 


26    NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE 

His  strange  manner  of  life  colored 
all  things.  "He  had  little  communica 
tion,"  writes  Mr.  Lathrop,  "with  even 
the  members  of  his  family.  Frequently 
his  meals  were  brought  and  left  at  his 
locked  door,  and  it  was  not  often  that 
the  four  inmates  of  the  old  Union  Street 
mansion  met  in  family  circle.  .  .  .  Haw 
thorne  once  said,  '  We  do  not  even  live 
at  our  house.' ? 

The  fact  that  Hawthorne  published 
much  at  this  time  under  fictitious 
names  served  to  keep  him  still  further 
within  the  shadow.  Writing  over  the 
signature  of  "Oberon,"  he  said:  "You 
cannot  conceive  what  an  effect  the  com 
position  of  these  tales  has  had  upon 
me.  I  have  become  ambitious  of  a 
bauble,  and  careless  of  solid  reputation. 
I  am  surrounding  myself  with  shadows, 
which  bewilder  me  by  aping  the  reali 
ties  of  life.  They  have  drawn  me  aside 
from  the  beaten  path  of  the  world,  and 
led  me  into  a  strange  sort  of  solitude, .  .  , 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE  27 
where  nobody  wishes  for  what  I  do,  nor 
thinks  nor  feels  as  I  do."  The  wonder 
is  that  Hawthorne's  mind  could  so  often 
and  so  airily  soar  above  the  shadows 
that  at  this  time  hung  about  him.  All 
that  he  could  yet  do  for  himself  was 
to  preserve  a  certain  repose  and  har 
mony  in  the  midst  of  uncertainty  and 
delay ;  and  for  this  he  formed  four  wise 
precepts, —  "to  break  off  customs,  to 
shake  off  spirits  ill-disposed,  to  meditate 
on  youth,  to  do  nothing  against  one's 
genius."  Thus  he  kept  himself  fresh 
and  flexible,  hopeful,  ready  for  emer 
gency. 


II. 

THE  help  of  Mr.  Bridge  in  print 
ing  the  first  volume  of  the  Tales  was 
like  the  first  streak  of  dawn  in  Haw 
thorne's  day.  It  was  before  then,  how 
ever,  that  Miss  Elizabeth  Peabody 
presented  herself  at  the  door  of  the 
Hawthorne  home,  and  asked  to  see 
Miss  Hawthorne.  It  appears  she  had 
read  everything  that  Hawthorne  had 
written,  and  even  discovered  his  hand 
under  his  fictitious  signatures.  Indeed, 
Miss  Peabody  had  gone  so  far  as  to 
make  a  resolve  to  write  to  the  author 
when  she  first  read  i '  The  Gentle  Boy. ' ' 
But  it  was  not  easy  to  discover  him ; 
and,  when  at  last  she  was  told  it  was 
"Mr.  Hathorne,"  as  the  name  was 
then  commonly  called,  she  concluded  it 
must  be  Miss  Hawthorne,  as  she  did 
not  remember  having  seen  a  brother. 
On  the  strength  of  this  information, 
she  called  at  the  house,  and  asked  to 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  29 
see  Miss  Hawthorne ;  but,  when  only 
Miss  Louisa  presented  herself,  Miss  Pea- 
body  devoted  the  powers  of  her  elo 
quence  to  telling  her  what  a  genius  her 
sister  possessed.  "My  brother,  you 
mean,"  was  the  response. 

"It  is  your  brother,  then!"  said 
Miss  Peabody.  "If  your  brother  can 
write  like  that,  he  has  no  right  to  be 
idle." 

"My  brother  never  is  idle,"  answered 
Miss  Louisa,  quietly. 

"Thus  began  an  acquaintance,"  con 
tinues  the  biographer,  "which  helped 
to  free  Hawthorne  from  the  spell  of 
solitude,  and  led  directly  to  the  richest 
experience  of  his  life." 

Some  months  passed,  and  there  was 
no  sequel  to  this  call.  But  early  in 
1837  a  prettily  bound  copy  of  Twice- 
told  Tales  came  to  Miss  Peabody ;  and 
she  soon  afterwards  had  some  correspond 
ence  with  Hawthorne,  in  order  to  en 
gage  him  for  the  Democratic  Review, 


30  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE 
which  was  about  to  be  started.  She 
also  invited  him  to  come  with  his  two 
sisters  to  pass  the  evening.  To  her  as 
tonishment,  they  all  came;  and,  when 
Miss  Peabody  opened  the  door  her 
self,  expecting  to  see  a  shy  youth,  a 
noble-looking  man,  with  a  face  expres 
sive  of  stern  determination,  stood  be 
tween  his  two  sisters.  "His  hostess 
brought  out  Flaxman's  designs  for 
Dante,  just  received  from  Professor 
Felton,  of  Harvard;  and  the  party 
made  an  evening's  entertainment  out 
of  them.77  Miss  Peabody  wrote  of  this 
evening:  " Sophia,  who  was  an  invalid, 
was  in  her  chamber.  As  soon  as  I  could, 
I  ran  upstairs  to  her,  and  said :  <  O 
Sophia,  you  must  get  up  and  dress  and 
come  down  !  The  Hawthornes  are  here, 
and  you  never  saw  anything  so  splendid 
as  he  is !  He  is  handsomer  than  Lord 
Byron!7  She  laughed,  but  refused  to 
come,  remarking  that,  since  he  had 
called  once,  he  would  call  again.  ... 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE  31 
Mr.  Hawthorne  looked  at  first  almost 
fierce,  with,  his  determination  not  to 
betray  his  sensitive  shyness,  which  he 
always  recognized  as  a  weakness.  .  .  . 
He  did  call  again,  as  Sophia  had  pre 
dicted,  not  long  afterwards ;  and  this 
time  she  came  down,  in  her  simple 
white  wrapper;  and  sat  on  the  sofa.  As 
I  said,  'My  sister,  Sophia,'  he  rose  and 
looked  at  her  intently :  he  did  not 
realize  how  intently.  As  we  went  on 
talking,  she  would  frequently  interpose 
a  remark,  in  her  low,  sweet  voice. 
Every  time  she  did  so  he  would  look  at 
her  again,  with  the  same  piercing,  in- 
drawing  gaze.  I  was  struck  with  it, 
and  thought,  'What  if  he  should  fall 
in  love  with  her ! ?  And  the  thought 
troubled  me  ;  for  she  had  often  told  me 
that  nothing  would  ever  tempt  her  to 
marry,  and  inflict  on  a  husband  the 
care  of  an  invalid.  When  Mr.  Haw 
thorne  got  up  to  go,  he  said  he  should 
come  for  me  in  the  evening  to  call  on 


0>THc     "      X 

iJKm/crnr*  I-.-**     \\ 


32   NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE 

his  sisters  ;  and  lie  added,  <  Miss  Sophia, 
won't  you  come,  too! '  But  she  replied, 
<I  never  go  out  in  the  evening,  Mr. 
Hawthorne.7  *I  wish  you  would/  he 
said,  in  a  low,  urgent  tone.  But  she 
smiled  and  shook  her  head,  and  he  went 
away." 

"It  may  be  remarked  here,"  writes 
his  son,  "that  Mrs.  Hawthorne,  in  tell 
ing  her  children,  many  years  after 
wards,  of  these  first  meetings  with  their 
father,  used  to  say  that  his  presence 
from  the  very  beginning  exercised  so 
strong  a  magnetic  attraction  upon  her 
that,  instinctively  and  in  self-defence, 
as  it  were,  she  drew  back  and  repelled 
him.  The  power  which  she  felt  in  him 
alarmed  her:  she  did  not  understand 
what  it  meant,  and  was  only  able  to 
feel  that  she  must  resist.  By  degrees, 
however,  her  resistance  was  overcome  ; 
and  in  the  end  she  realized  that  they 
had  loved  each  other  at  first  sight." 
Miss  Peabody  says  that  Hawthorne  once 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  33 
told  her  at  this  period  that  his  sisters 
lived  so  completely  out  of  the  world 
that  they  hardly  knew  its  customs,  but 
that  his  sister  Elizabeth  was  very  witty 
and  original,  and  knew  the  world  re 
markably  well  in  one  sense,  seeing  that 
she  learned  it  only  through  books.  She 
stayed  in  her  den,  and  he  in  his.  "I 
have  scarcely  seen  her  in  three  months,'7 
he  added.  "  After  tea  my  mother  and 
Louisa  come  down  and  sit  with  me  in 
the  little  parlor;  but  both  Elizabeth 
and  my  mother  take  their  meals  in 
their  rooms,  and  my  mother  has  eaten 
alone  ever  since  my  father's  death." 

"  Whenever,  after  this,  Mr.  Haw 
thorne  called  at  our  house,"  continues 
Miss  Peabody,  "he  generally  saw  So 
phia.  One  day  she  showed  him  her 
illustration  of  'The  Gentle  Boy,'  saying, 
<I  want  to  know  if  this  looks  like 
your  Ilbrahimf  He  sat  down  and 
looked  at  it,  then  looked  up  and  said, 
' He  will  never  look  otherwise  to  me.' 


34  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE 
...  A  year  later  lie  wrote  to  me, 
*  Sophia  is  a  flower  to  be  worn  in  no 
man's  bosom,  but  was  lent  from  heaven, 
to  show  the  possibilities  of  the  human 
soul.'  " 

Evidently  from  this  moment  Haw 
thorne  was  very  much  in  love ;  but  it 
was  not  until  his  thirty-fifth  year  that 
he  became  engaged,  about  two  years 
after  their  first  acquaintance.  Miss 
Elizabeth  Peabody  having  left  Salem, 
the  course  of  Hawthorne's  intimacy  with 
his  future  wife  ran  on  naturally  enough. 
Hawthorne's  mother  and  sisters  became 
very  fond  of  her.  She  went  frequently 
to  their  house,  and  by  small  attentions 
tried  to  win  them  away  from  their  for 
mer  habits  of  life.  "  Madame  Haw 
thorne,"  wrote  Elizabeth  Peabody,  "  al 
ways  looked  as  if  she  had  walked  out  of 
an  old  picture,  with  her  antique  cos 
tume  and  a  face  of  lovely  sensibility  and 
brightness ;  for  she  did  not  seem  at  all  a 
victim  of  morbid  sensibility,  notwith- 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE   35 

standing  her  all  but  Hindoo  self-devo 
tion  to  the  manes  of  her  husband.  .  .  . 
Mr.  Hawthorne  used  to  say  that  he  in 
herited  the  granite  that  was  in  him  from 
the  paternal  side,  which  contrasted 
strongly  with  the  Manning  sensibility.77 
Hawthorne  did  not  marry  until  1842, 
three  or  nearly  four  years  after  his  en 
gagement.  It  appears  that  his  sisters 
fancied  that  Sophia7  s  invalidism  made 
any  change  of  this  kind  impossible,  and 
persuaded  their  brother  of  the  evil  effect 
it  would  have  upon  his  mother.  "  In 
deed,77  writes  their  son,  "  Hawthorne 
himself,  and  Sophia  not  less  than  he, 
felt  the  weight  of  the  pathological  objec 
tion  ;  and  Sophia  consented  to  let  the 
engagement  continue  only  upon  the 
stipulation  that  their  marriage  was  to  be 
strictly  contingent  upon  her  own  recov 
ery  from  her  twenty  years7  illness.  '  If 
God  intends  us  to  marry,7  she  said  to 
him,  '  He  will  let  me  be  cured ;  if  not, 
it  will  be  a  sign  that  it  is  not  best.7 


36  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE 
The  likelihood  of  a  cure  taking  place 
certainly  did  not  seem  great :  in  fact,  it 
would  be  little  less  than  a  miracle. 
Miracle  or  not,  however,  the  cure  was 
actually  accomplished;  and  the  lovers 
were  justified  in  believing  that  Love 
himself  was  the  physician.  When  So 
phia  Peabody  became  Sophia  Haw 
thorne,  in  1842,  she  was,  for  the  first 
time  since  her  infancy,  in  perfect  health  ; 
nor  did  she  ever  afterwards  relapse  into 
her  previous  condition  of  invalidism." 
At  this  time,  evidently,  Hawthorne 
felt  the  need  of  planting  his  feet  more 
firmly  upon  the  solid  earth.  He  there 
fore  accepted,  without  more  indecision 
than  was  natural  to  a  man  whose  occu 
pations  were  of  a  different  character, 
the  post  of  weigher  and  ganger  in  the 
Boston  Custom-house  on  a  salary  of 
twelve  hundred  dollars  a  year.  The 
position  came  to  him  through  the 
influence  of  his  Democratic  friends. 
President  Yan  Bur  en  had  been  two 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  37 
years  in  office ;  and  Mr.  Bancroft,  the 
historian,  was  collector  of  the  port  for 
Boston.  The  Democratic  party  was  in 
terested  to  help  the  literary  men  for 
whom  literature  itself  was  really  no  sup 
port,  and  they  gladly  called  Hawthorne 
to  such  place  as  they  had  to  bestow  until 
there  should  be  a  change  in  the  adminis 
tration  two  years  later.  He  said,  how 
ever,  just  before  entering  the  collector's 
office  he  noticed  a  man  leaving  it  who 
wore  a  very  dejected  air  5  and,  connect 
ing  this  with  the  change  in  his  own  ap 
pointment  (the  first  proposition  having 
been  to  give  Hawthorne  a  much  smaller 
place),  he  imagined  this  person  to  be 
the  just-ejected  weigher.  Later  he  said  : 
"I  don't  believe  in  rotation  in  office. 
It  is  not  good  for  the  human  being." 

He  wrote  to  Longfellow  :  "I  have  no 
reason  to  doubt  my  capacity  to  fill  the 
duties,  for  I  don't  know  what  they  are. 
They  tell  me  that  a  considerable  portion 
of  my  time  will  be  unoccupied,  the 


38  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE 
which  I  mean  to  employ  in  sketches  of 
my  new  experience  under  some  such 
titles  as  follows :  i  Scenes  in  Dock, ' 
'  Voyages  at  Anchor/  'Mbblings  of  a 
"Wharf  Eat/  'Trials  of  a  Tide-waiter/ 
'Eomance  of  the  Ee venue  service/  to 
gether  with  an  ethical  work  in  two  vol 
umes,  on  the  subject  of  '  Duties/  the  first 
volume  to  treat  of  moral  and  religious 
duties,  and  the  second  of  duties  imposed 
by  the  Eevenue  Laws,  which  I  begin 
to  consider  the  most  important  class. " 
The  irony  in  this  note  brings  back  with 
strange  vividness  the  personality  of 
Hawthorne  as  he  was  in  the  world  of 
men  and  women.  It  was  the  form  his 
talk  was  apt  to  take,  his  wit  being 
pervaded  with  this  quality.  The  joy- 
ousness  which  expresses  itself  in  humor 
was  not  his. 

But  he  was  at  this  moment  determined 
to  face  a  life  of  activity.  "I  want  to 
have  something  to  do  with  the  material 
world/'  he  said  to  a  friend :  "if  I  could 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  39 
only  make  tables,  I  should  feel  myself 
more  of  a  man."  There  is  something 
pathetic  beyond  expression  in  this  out 
burst,  which  betrays  the  result  of  his 
unnatural  seclusion.  Hawthorne  knew 
he  was  a  writer,  but  his  very  slight 
recognition  from  Americans  of  that 
period  flung  him  back  too  rudely  upon 
himself.  Longfellow  had  administered 
true  consolation  (as  he  did  so  often,  let 
us  remember)  by  writing  the  most  im 
portant  review,  probably,  of  the  Twice- 
told  Tales  j — certainly,  the  one  which 
gave  the  greatest  pleasure  to  Haw 
thorne.  In  his  first  letter  to  Long 
fellow,  presenting  a  copy  of  his  book, 
Hawthorne  speaks  as  if  he  had  seen 
or  heard  very  little  of  Longfellow  since 
their  college  days.  "We  were  not,  it 
is  true,  so  well  acquainted  at  college 
that  I  can  plead  an  absolute  right  to 
inflict  my  f  twice-told7  tediousness  upon 
you;  but  I  have  often  regretted  we  were 
not  better  known  to  each  other,  and  have 


40  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE 
been  glad  of  your  success  in  literature 
and  in  more  important  matters. "  After 
what  Hawthorne  calls  a  "  kind  and  cor 
dial  "  reply  to  his  letter,  he  writes  again 
at  greater  length :  "It  gratifies  me  that 
you  have  occasionally  felt  an  interest  in 
my  situation;  but  your  quotation  from 
Jean  Paul,  about  the  'lark's  nest,'  makes 
me  smile.  You  would  have  been  much 
nearer  the  truth  if  you  had  pictured  me 
as  dwelling  in  an  owl's  nest, — for  mine 
is  about  as  dismal ;  and,  like  the  owl,  I 
seldom  venture  abroad  till  after  dusk. 
By  some  witchcraft  or  other  —  for  I 
really  cannot  assign  any  reasonable  why 
or  wherefore  —  I  have  been  carried  apart 
from  the  main  current  of  life,  and  find  it 
impossible  to  get  back  again.  Since  we 
last  met,  which  you  remember  was  in 
Sawtell's  room,  where  you  read  a  fare 
well  poem  to  the  relics  of  the  class, — 
ever  since  that  time  I  have  secluded  my 
self  from  society;  and  yet  I  never  meant 
any  such  thing,  nor  dreamed  what  sort 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  41 
of  life  I  was  going  to  lead.  I  have  made 
a  captive  of  myself,  and  put  me  into  a 
dungeon ;  and  now  I  cannot  find  the  key 
to  let  myself  out,  and,  if  the  door  were 
open,  I  should  be  almost  afraid  to  come 
out.  You  tell  me  you  have  met  with 
troubles  and  changes.  I  know  not  what 
these  may  have  been ;  but  I  can  assure 
you  that  trouble  is  the  next  best  thing  to 
enjoyment,  and  that  there  is  no  fate  in 
this  world  so  horrible  as  to  have  no  share 
in  either  its  joys  or  sorrows.  For  the 
last  ten  years  I  have  not  lived,  but  only 
dreamed  of  living.  It  may  be  true  that 
there  have  been  some  unsubstantial 
pleasures  here  in  the  shade,  which  I 
might  have  missed  in  the  sunshine  ;  but 
you  cannot  conceive  how  utterly  devoid 
of  satisfaction  all  my  retrospects  are.  .  .  . 
If  my  writings  had  made  any  decided 
impression,  I  should  have  been  stimulated 
to  greater  exertions ;  but  there  has  been 
no  warmth  of  approbation,  so  that  I  have 
always  written  with  benumbed  fingers. 


42  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE 
I  have  another  great  difficulty  in  the  lack 
of  materials ;  for  I  have  seen  so  little  of 
the  world  that  I  have  nothing  bnt  thin 
air  to  concoct  my  stories  of.  Sometimes, 
through  a  peep-hole,  I  have  caught  a 
glimpse  of  the  real  world  ;  and  the  two 
or  three  articles  in  which  I  have  por 
trayed  these  glimpses  please  me  better 
than  the  others. 

"I  have  now,  or  shall  soon  have,  a 
sharper  spur  to  exertion,  which  I  lacked 
at  an  earlier  period;  for  I  see  little  pros 
pect  but  that  I  shall  have  to  scribble  for 
a  living.  But  this  troubles  me  much  less 
than  you  would  suppose.  I  can  turn  my 
pen  to  all  sorts  of  drudgery,  such  as 
children's  books,  etc. ;  and  by  and  by  I 
shall  get  some  editorship  that  will  answer 
my  purpose.  Frank  Pierce,  who  was 
with  us  at  college,  offered  me  his  influ 
ence  to  obtain  an  office  in  the  explor 
ing  expedition  [Commodore  Wilkes's]  5 
but  I  believe  he  was  mistaken  in  suppos 
ing  that  a  vacancy  existed." 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORKE  43 
These  letters  to  Longfellow  show  a 
perfect  frankness,  and  allow  us  a  better 
glimpse  of  the  situation  than  we  find 
elsewhere.  He  was  to  join  no  delight 
ful  " exploring  expedition/7  but  was  to 
face  a  life  of  drudgery  for  the  first  and 
only  time  in  his  existence,  if  we  may 
except  his  laborious  days  at  Brook 
Farm ;  but  these  were  so  fanned  by 
nature's  breezes  and  relieved  by  society 
that  labor,  on  the  whole,  wore  a  dif 
ferent  face.  His  desire  to  see  the  la 
boring  world  and  to  share  its  duties 
was  not  unnatural  for  one  possessed  of 
manly  vigor,  who  had  found  himself 
so  nearly  disengaged  from  the  ways  of 
men  as  to  be  sometimes  floating  double, 
"swan  and  shadow,"  scarcely  knowing 
the  one  from  the  other.  Even  Tennyson, 
crowned  with  all  success,  is  reported  once 
as  longing  to  stand,  for  a  while  at  least, 
hand  to  hand  with  the  workers  of  the 
world :  how  much  more  Hawthorne,  who 
watched  the  airy  webs  of  his  fancy  sail 


44    NATHANIEL   HAWTHOKNE 
away  with  the  clouds,  leaving  him  hun 
gry,  solitary,  and  denuded  ! 

Therefore  in  1839  he  accepted  a  posi 
tion  in  the  Boston  Custom-house.  "My 
life  only  is  a  burden/'  he  writes,  "in 
the  same  way  that  it  is  to  every  toilsome 
man.  .  .  .  But  from  henceforth  forever 
I  shall  be  entitled  to  call  the  sons  of  toil 
my  brethren,  and  shall  know  how  to 
sympathise  with  them,  seeing  that  I 
likewise  have  risen  at  dawn  and  borne 
the  fervor  of  the  mid- day  sun,  nor 
turned  my  heavy  footsteps  homeward 
till  eventide. ' ?  "  He  need  not  always, ?  ? 
says  one  of  his  biographers,  "have  made 
the  employment  so  severe  j  but  the 
wages  of  the  wharf  laborers  depended  on 
the  number  of  hours  they  worked  in  a 
day,  and  Hawthorne  used  to  make  it  a 
point  in  all  weathers  to  get  to  the  wharf 
at  the  earliest  possible  hour,  solely  for 
their  benefit." 

That  was  like  him, — generous,  accu 
rate,  unselfish.  Indeed,  his  religious 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE  45 
nature  struck  its  roots  all  the  deeper 
because  they  were  in  the  dark.  He 
seldom  went  to  church  or  made  any 
further  outward  manifestation  of  his 
nearness  to  divine  things  than  what  we 
may  discover  in  his  life.  He  says  in 
one  of  those  love-letters  written  in 
the  custom-house  days  during  his  long 
engagement:  " Indeed,  I  feel  some 
what  afraid  to  hear  this  divine  Father 
Taylor,  lest  my  sympathy  with  your 
admiration  of  him  be  colder  and  feebler 
than  you  look  for.  Our  souls  are  in 
happiest  unison ;  but  we  must  not  dis 
quiet  ourselves  if  every  tone  be  not  re 
echoed  from  one  to  the  other,  if  every 
slightest  shade  be  not  reflected  in  the 
alternate  mirror.  Our  broad  and  gen 
eral  sympathy  is  enough  to  secure  our 
bliss,  without  our  following  it  into 
minute  details.  Will  you  promise  not 
to  be  troubled,  should  I  be  unable  to 
appreciate  the  excellence  of  Father  Tay 
lor!  Promise  me  this;  and  at  some 


46    NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE 

auspicious  hour,  which  I  trust  will  soon 
arrive,  Father  Taylor  shall  have  an  op 
portunity  to  make  music  with  my  soul. 
But  I  forewarn  you,  dearest,  that  I  am  a 
most  unmalleable  man.  You  are  not  to 
suppose,  because  my  spirit  answers  to 
every  touch  of  yours,  that  therefore 
every  breeze  or  even  every  whirlwind 
can  upturn  me  from  my  depths. " 

There  is  a  letter  of  this  period  giving 
an  unvarnished  picture  of  his  occupation 
in  a  business  so  little  suited  to  him.  ' *  I 
have  been  measuring  coal  all  day,"  he 
writes  during  the  winter  of  1840,  "on 
board  of  a  black  little  British  schooner 
in  a  dismal  dock  at  the  north  end  of  the 
city.  Most  of  the  time  I  paced  the  deck 
to  keep  myself  warm ;  for  the  wind 
(north-east,  I  believe)  blew  up  through 
the  dock  as  if  it  had  been  the  pipe  of  a 
pair  of  bellows.  The  vessel  lying  deep 
between  two  wharves,  there  was  no  more 
delightful  prospect  on  the  right  hand 
and  on  the  left  than  the  posts  and  tim- 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  47 
bers  half  immersed  in  the  water  and 
covered  with  ice,  which  the  rising  and 
falling  of  successive  tides  had  left  upon 
them,  so  that  they  looked  like  immense 
icicles.  Across  the  water,  however,  not 
more  than  half  a  mile  off,  appeared  the 
Bunker's  Hill  Monument  and,  what  in 
terested  me  considerably  more,  a  church 
steeple  with  the  dial  of  a  clock  upon  it, 
whereby  I  was  enabled  to  measure  the 
march  of  the  weary  hours.  Sometimes 
I  descended  into  the  dirty  little  cabin  of 
the  schooner,  and  warmed  myself  by  a 
red-hot  stove,  among  biscuit-barrels,  pots 
and  kettles,  sea-chests,  and  innumerable 
lumber  of  all  sorts,  my  olfactories  mean 
while  being  greatly  refreshed  with  the 
odour  of  a  pipe  which  the  captain  or 
some  one  of  his  crew  was  smoking.  But 
at  last  came  the  sunset,  with  delicate 
clouds  and  a  purple  light  upon  the 
islands ;  and  I  blessed  it,  because  it  was 
the  signal  of  my  release.7'  "A  worse 
man  than  Hawthorne,7'  says  Mr.  James, 


48  &ATHAKIEL  HAWTHORNE 
"  would  have  measured  coal  quite  as 
well ;  and,  of  all  the  dismal  tasks  to 
which  an  unremunerated  imagination 
has  ever  had  to  accommodate  itself,  I 
remember  none  more  sordid.'7  A  little 
later  Hawthorne  writes  further  on  this 
same  topic:  "I  pray  that  in  one  year 
more  I  may  find  some  way  of  escaping 
from  this  unblest  custom-house,  for  it  is 
a  very  grievous  thraldom.  I  do  detest 
all  offices, —  all,  at  least,  that  are  held  on 
a  political  tenure ;  and  I  want  nothing 
to  do  with  politicians.  Their  hearts 
wither  away  and  die  out  of  their  bodies. 
Their  consciences  are  turned  to  India- 
rubber,  or  to  some  substance  as  black  as 
that  and  which  will  stretch  as  much. 
One  thing,  if  no  more,  I  have  gained  by 
my  custom-house  experience, — to  know 
a  politician.  It  is  a  knowledge  which 
no  previous  thought  nor  power  of  sym 
pathy  could  have  taught  me,  because 
the  animal  —  or  the  machine,  rather  —  is 
not  in  nature." 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE  49 
Again,  a  few  days  later  lie  continued 
in  another  letter:  "I  do  not  think  it 
is  the  doom  laid  upon  me  of  murdering 
so  many  of  the  brightest  hours  of  the 
day  at  the  custom-house  that  makes  such 
havoc  with  my  wits ;  for  here  I  am 
again  trying  to  write  worthily,  .  .  .  yet 
with  a  sense  as  if  all  the  noblest  part 
of  man  had  been  left  out  of  my  com 
position  or  had  decayed  out  of  it  since 
my  nature  was  given  to  my  own  keep 
ing.  .  .  .  Never  comes  any  bird  of  para 
dise  into  that  dismal  region.  A  salt  or 
even  a  coal  ship  is  ten  million  times 
preferable,  for  there  the  sky  is  above 
me  and  the  fresh  breeze  around  me; 
and  my  thoughts,  having  hardly  any 
thing  to  do  with  my  occupation,  are 
as  free  as  air.  ...  It  is  only  once  in  a 
while  that  the  image  and  desire  of  a 
better  and  happier  life  makes  me  feel 
the  iron  of  my  chain  5  for,  after  all,  a 
human  spirit  may  find  no  insufficiency 
of  food  for  it,  even  in  the  custom-house. 


50  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE 
And,  with  such  materials  as  these,  I  do 
think  and  feel  and  learn  things  that  are 
worth  knowing,  and  which  I  should  not 
know  unless  I  had  learned  them  there. 
So  that  the  present  position  of  my  life 
shall  not  be  quite  left  out  of  the  sum  of 
my  real  existence.  ...  It  is  good  for  me, 
on  many  accounts,  that  my  life  has  had 
this  passage  in  it.  I  know  much  more 
than  I  did  a  year  ago.  I  have  a  stronger 
sense  of  power  to  act  as  a  man  among 
men.  I  have  gained  worldly  wisdom, — 
and  wisdom,  also,  that  is  not  altogether 
of  this  world.  And,  when  I  quit  this 
earthly  career  where  I  am  now  buried, 
nothing  will  cling  to  me  that  ought  to 
be  left  behind.  Men  will  not  perceive,  I 
trust,  by  my  look  or  the  tenor  of  my 
thoughts  and  feelings,  that  I  have  been 
a  custom-house  officer.  .  .  .  When  I  shall 
be  free  again,  I  will  enjoy  all  things 
with  the  fresh  simplicity  of  a  child  of 
five  years  old." 
To  Sophia  he  wrote  :  "Six  or  seven 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKKE  51 
hours  of  cheerful  solitude  !  But  I  will 
not  be  alone.  I  invite  your  spirit  to  be 
with  me, — at  any  hour  and  as  many 
hours  as  you  please, — but  especially  at 
the  twilight  hour,  before  I  light  my 
lamp.  I  bid  you  at  that  particular  time, 
because  I  can  see  visions  more  vividly 
in  the  dusky  glow  of  firelight  than  either 
by  daylight  or  lamplight.  Come,  and 
let  me  renew  my  spell  against  headache 
and  other  direful  effects  of  the  east  wind. 
How  I  wish  I  could  give  you  a  portion 
of  my  insensibility  !  and  yet  I  should  be 
almost  afraid  of  some  radical  transforma 
tion,  were  I  to  produce  a  change  in  that 
respect.  If  you  cannot  grow  plump  and 
rosy  and  tough  and  vigorous  without 
being  changed  into  another  nature,  then 
I  do  think,  for  this  short  life,  you  had 
better  remain  just  what  you  are.  Yes  ; 
but  you  will  be  the  same  to  me,  because 
we  have  met  in  eternity,  and  there  our 
intimacy  was  formed.  ...  I  never  till 
now  had  a  friend  who  could  give  me 


52   NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE 
repose.  .  .  .  But  peace   overflows    from 
your  heart  into  mine." 

Again  he  writes  to  her:  "I  have  a 
mind  some  day  to  send  you  a  journal  of 
all  my  doings  and  sufferings,  my  whole 
external  life,  from  the  time  I  awake  at 
dawn  till  I  close  my  eyes  at  night.  What 
a  dry,  dull  history  would  it  be  !  But 
then,  apart  from  this,  I  would  write 
another  journal  of  my  inward  life 
throughout  the  same  day, —  my  fits  of 
pleasant  thought,  and  those  likewise 
which  are  shadowed  by  passing  clouds, 
—  the  desires  of  my  heart  towards  you, — 
my  pictures  of  what  we  are  to  enjoy  to 
gether.  Nobody  would  think  that  the 
same  man  could  live  two  such  different 
lives  simultaneously.  But,  then,  the 
grosser  life  is  a  dream  and  the  spiritual 
life  is  a  reality." 

And  in  another  letter  he  says:  "I 
have  met  with  an  immense  misfortune. 
Do  you  sympathise  from  the  bottom  of 
your  heart?  .  .  .  Now  art  thou  all  in 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  53 
a  fever  of  anxiety!  Shall  I  tell  thee! 
No ;  yes,  I  will.  I  have  received  an 
invitation  to  a  party  at  General  McNeiPs 
next  Friday  evening.  Why  will  not 
people  let  poor  persecuted  me  alone! 
What  possible  good  can  it  do  for  me  to 
thrust  my  coal-begrimed  visage  and  salt- 
befrosted  locks  into  good  society  !  What 
claim  have  I  to  be  there, — a  humble 
measurer,  a  subordinate  custom-house 
officer,  as  I  am !  I  cannot  go ;  I  will 
not  go.  I  intend  to  pass  that  evening 
with  you, — that  is,  in  musing  and  dream 
ing  of  you ;  and,  moreover,  considering 
that  we  love  each  other,  methinks  it  is 
an  exceeding  breach  of  etiquette  that 
you  were  not  invited.  How  strange  it 
is,  tender  and  fragile  little  Sophie,  that 
your  protection  should  have  become  ab 
solutely  necessary  to  such  a  great,  rough, 
burly,  broad-shouldered  personage  as  I ! 
I  need  your  support  as  much  as  you 
need  mine." 

Again  he  exclaims  :  "  What  a  letter  ! 


54  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE 
Never  was  so  much  beauty  poured  out 
of  any  heart  before  ;  and  to  read  it  over 
and  over  is  like  bathing  my  brow  in 
a  fresh  fountain  and  drinking  draughts 
that  renew  the  life  within  me.  .  .  .  How 
can  you  say  that  I  have  ever  written 
anything  beautiful,  being  yourself  so 
potent  to  reproduce  whatever  is  love 
liest!  If  I  did  not  know  that  you  loved 
me,  I  should  even  be  ashamed  before 
you.  Worthy  of  you  I  am  not ;  but  you 
will  make  me  so,  for  there  will  be  time 
or  eternity  enough  for  your  blessed  in 
fluence  to  work  on  me." 

"  BOSTON,  July  10,  1840. 

"  Dearest, — My  days  have  been  so 
busy  and  my  evenings  so  invaded  with 
visitants  that  I  have  not  had  a  moment's 
time  to  talk  with  you.  Scarcely  till 
this  morning  have  I  been  able  to  read 
your  letter  quietly.  Night  before  last 

came  Mr. ;  and    you  know  he  is 

somewhat  unconscionable  as  to  the  length 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE   55 

of  his  calls.     The  next  afternoon  came 

Mr. 's  London  brother,  and  wasted 

my  precious  hours  with  a  dull  talk  of 
nothing  ;  and  in  the  evening  I  was  sorely 

tried  with  Mr. and  a  Cambridge 

law  student,  who  came  to  do  homage  to 
my  literary  renown.  So  you  were  put 
aside  for  those  idle  people.  I  do  wish 
the  blockheads  and  all  other  blockheads 
in  this  world  could  comprehend  how  in 
estimable  are  the  quiet  hours  of  a  busy 
man,  especially  when  that  man  has  no 
native  impulse  to  keep  him  busy,  but  is 
continually  forced  to  battle  with  his  own 
nature,  which  yearns  for  seclusion  (the 
solitude  of  a  united  two)  and  freedom  to 
think  and  dream  and  feel."  .  .  . 

"BOSTON,  October,  1840. 

.  .  .  "  Sometimes  during  my  solitary 
life  in  our  old  Salem  house  it  seemed  to 
me  I  had  only  life  enough  to  know  that  I 
was  not  alive  ;  for  I  had  no  wife  then  to 
keep  my  heart  warm.  But,  at  length,, 


56  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOEKE 
you  were  revealed  to  me,  in  the  shadow 
of  a  seclusion  as  deep  as  my  own.  I 
drew  nearer  and  nearer  to  you,  and 
opened  my  heart  to  you  ;  and  you  came 
to  me,  and  will  remain  forever,  keeping 
my  heart  warm  and  renewing  my  life 
with  your  own."  .  .  . 

"  SALEM,  November,  1840. 

"  Whenever  I  return  to  Salem,  I  feel 
how  dark  my  life  would  be  without  the 
light  that  you  shed  upon  it, — how  cold 
without  the  warmth  of  your  love.  Sit 
ting  in  this  chamber  where  my  youth 
wasted  itself  in  vain,  I  can  partly  esti 
mate  the  change  that  has  been  wrought. 
It  seems  as  if  the  better  part  of  me  had 
been  born  since  then.  I  had  walked 
those  many  years  in  darkness,  and 
might  so  have  walked  through  life,  with 
only  a  dreamy  notion  that  there  was  any 
light  in  the  universe,  if  you  had  not 
kissed  my  eyelids  and  given  me  to  see. 
.  .  ,  You  live  ten  times  as  much  as  I, 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  57 
because  your  spirit  takes  so  much  more 
note  of  things.7' 


IIL 

HAWTHORNE'S  removal  from  the  cus 
tom-house  came  promptly  with  the  change 
of  administration,  when  his  two  years 
of  service  were  over,  although  Bancroft 
told  Emerson  that  Hawthorne  was  the 
laost  efficient  and  the  best  of  the  cus 
tom-house  officers.  It  cannot  be  said  that 
either  he  or  Sophia  regretted  this,  al 
though  for  the  moment  it  seemed  to 
put  away  still  farther  the  prospect  of 
their  marriage ;  but  this  was  only  for  a 
moment.  Mr.  Eipley  was  at  this  junc 
ture  beginning  the  experiment  at  Brook 
Farm ;  and  Hawthorne  nourished  the 
fancy  that  a  home  for  his  wife  and  him 
self  could  be  planted  there.  "It  seems 
odd,"  as  Mr.  Lathrop  says,  "that  the 
least  gregarious  of  men  should  have 
been  drawn  into  a  socialistic  commu 
nity;"  but,  as  we  have  seen,  he  had 
a  practical  end  in  view.  Besides,  as 
Mr.  James  so  admirably  continues,  "it 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE  59 
is  only  fair  to  believe  that  Hawthorne 
was  interested  in  the  experiment ;  and, 
though  he  was  not  a  Transcendentalist, 
an  Abolitionist,  or  a  Fourierite,  as  his 
companions  in  some  degree  or  other 
were  likely  to  be,  he  was  willing,  as  a 
generous  and  unoccupied  young  man,  to 
lend  a  hand  in  any  reasonable  scheme 
for  helping  people  to  live  together  on 
better  terms  than  the  common.  .  .  . 
The  main  characteristic  of  the  commu 
nity  was  that  each  individual  concerned 
in  it  should  do  a  part  of  the  work  neces 
sary  for  keeping  the  whole  machine 
going. " 

Furthermore,  Hawthorne  as  a  writer 
could  not  have  been  blind  to  the  fact 
that  he  should  see  some  persons  of  char 
acter  at  close  range,  and  be  enabled,  in 
the  future,  to  make  use  of  his  expe 
rience.  Whether  he  made  this  clear 
to  himself  or  not,  his  stay  at  Brook 
Farm  becomes  a  period  of  special  im 
portance  in  his  life,  as  furnishing  mate- 


60  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKKE 
rial  for  one  of  his  three  great  Ameri 
can  novels,  The  Blithedale  Romance.  Mr. 
James  says  of  his  heroine  :  "Zenobia  is, 
to  my  sense,  his  only  definite  attempt  at 
the  representation  of  a  character.  The 
portrait  is  full  of  alteration  and  embel 
lishment,  but  it  has  a  greater  reality,  a 
greater  abundance  of  detail,  than  any  of 
his  other  figures  5  and  the  reality  was  a 
memory  of  a  lady  whom  he  had  encoun 
tered  in  the  Eoxbury  pastoral  or  among 
the  wood- walks  of  Concord,  with  strange 
books  in  her  hand  and  eloquent  discourse 
on  her  lips.  The  Blithedale  Romance  was 
written  just  after  her  unhappy  death, 
when  the  reverberation  of  her  talk 
would  lose  much  of  its  harshness.  In 
fact,  however,  very  much  the  same  qual 
ities  that  made  Hawthorne  a  Democrat 
in  politics  —  his  contemplative  turn,  .  .  . 
his  taste  for  old  ideals  and  loitering  paces 
and  muffled  tones  —  would  operate  to 
keep  him  out  of  actual  sympathy  with  a 
woman  of  the  so-called  progressive  type. 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE  61 
We  may  be  sure  that  his  taste  in  women 
was  conservative. ' J 

Hawthorne  wrote  to  his  sister  in  May, 
after  a  few  weeks'  residence  at  Brook 
Farm:  "As  the  weather  precludes  all 
possibility  of  ploughing,  hoeing,  sowing, 
and  other  such  operations,  I  bethink  me 
that  you  may  have  no  objections  to  hear 
something  of  my  whereabout  and  what- 
about.  You  are  to  know,  then,  that  I 
took  up  my  abode  here  on  the  12th  ul 
timo,  in  the  midst  of  a  snow-storm  which 
kept  us  all  idle  for  a  day  or  two.  At 
the  first  glimpse  of  fair  weather  Mr. 
Eipley  summoned  us  into  the  cow-yard, 
and  introduced  me  to  an  instrument  with 
four  prongs,  commonly  entitled  a  dung- 
fork.  With  this  tool  I  have  already 
assisted  to  load  twenty  or  thirty  carts  of 
manure,  and  I  shall  take  part  in  loading 
nearly  three  hundred  more.  Besides,  I 
have  planted  potatoes  and  pease,  cut 
straw  and  hay  for  the  cattle,  and  done 
various  other  mighty  works.  .  .  .  The 


62  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE 
weather  has  been  so  unfavorable  that  we 
have  worked  comparatively  little  in  the 
fields;  but,  nevertheless,  I  have  gained 
strength  wonderfully, — grown  quite  a 
giant,  in  fact,  —  and  can  do  a  day's  work 
without  the  slightest  inconvenience.  In 
short,  I  am  transformed  into  a  complete 
farmer. 

"This  is  one  of  the  most  beautiful 
places  I  ever  saw  in  my  life,  and  as  se 
cluded  as  if  it  were  a  hundred  miles 
from  any  city  or  village.  There  are 
woods  in  which  we  can  ramble  all  day 
without  meeting  anybody  or  scarcely 
seeing  a  house.  Our  house  stands  apart 
from  the  main  road,  so  that  we  are  not 
troubled  even  with  passengers  looking 
at  us.  Once  in  a  while  we  have  a  Tran 
scendental  visitor,  such  as  Mr.  Alcott; 
but,  generally,  we  pass  whole  days  with 
out  seeing  a  single  face  save  those  of  the 
brethren.7' 

Among  the  residents  at  Brook  Farm 
during  Hawthorne's  stay  and  afterwards 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE  63 
were  George  P.  Bradford,  the  Eev.  War 
ren  Burton,  and  Frank  Farley,  whom 
Hawthorne  saw  most  frequently ;  also 
Charles  Dana,  Pratt,  the  young  Brown- 
son,  Horace  Sumner  (a  younger  brother 
of  Charles),  George  William  Curtis  and 
his  brother  Burrill  Curtis. 

"  The  whole  fraternity, "  he  continues, 
"eat  together;  and  such  a  delectable 
way  of  life  has  never  been  seen  on  earth 
since  the  days  of  the  early  Christians. 
We  get  up  at  half-past  four,  breakfast 
at  half- past  six,  dine  at  half-past  twelve, 
and  go  to  bed  at  nine."  He  signs  him 
self  "Hath.  Hawthorne,  ploughman. " 

The  Peabody  family  having  moved  to 
West  Street,  Boston,  Hawthorne7  s  letters 
to  his  future  wife  are  addressed  to  her 
there. 

"It  seems  as  if  all  evil  things  had 
more  power  over  you  when  I  am  away. 
Then  you  are  exposed  to  noxious  winds 
and  to  pestilence  and  to  death-like  weari 
ness  ;  and,  moreover,  nobody  knows  how 


c4  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE 

to  take  care  of  you  but  nie.  Everybody 
else  thinks  it  of  importance  that  you 
should  paint  and  sculpture,  but  it  would 
be  no  trouble  to  me  if  you  should 
never  touch  clay  or  canvas  again.  It 
is  not  what  you  do,  but  what  you  are, 
that  I  concern  myself  about.  And,  if 
your  mighty  works  are  to  be  wrought 
only  by  the  anguish  of  your  head  and 
weariness  of  your  frame  and  sinking  of 
your  heart,  then  do  I  never  desire  to  see 
another.7' 

"BROOK  FARM,  Aug.  22,  1841. 

"  When  am  I  to  see  you  again?  The 
first  of  September  comes  a  week  from 
Tuesday  next,  but  I  think  I  shall  compel 
it  to  begin  on  Sunday.  Will  you  con 
sent!  Then  on  Saturday  afternoon  I 
will  come  to  you,  and  remain  in  the  city 
till  Monday.  Thence  I  shall  go  to  Salem 
and  spend  a  week  there,  longer  or 
shorter,  according  to  the  intensity  of  the 
occasion  for  my  presence.  I  do  long  to 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE  65 
see  our  mother  and  sisters,  and  I  should 
not  wonder  if  they  felt  some  slight  desire 
to  see  me."  .  .  . 

"  SALEM,  Sept.  3,  1841. 

...  "I  feel  moved  to  write,  though 
the  haze  and  sleepiness  which  always 
settle  upon  me  here  will  be  perceptible 
in  every  line.  But  what  a  letter  you 
wrote  to  me  !  It  is  like  one  angel  writ 
ing  to  another  angel.  But,  alas !  the 
letter  has  miscarried,  and  has  been  de 
livered  to  a  most  unworthy  mortal." 

"I  have  been  out  only  once  in  the 
daytime  since  my  arrival.  How  imme 
diately  and  irrecoverably  (if  you  did  not 
keep  me  out  of  the  abyss)  should  I  re 
lapse  into  the  way  of  life  in  which  I 
spent  my  youth  !  If  it  were  not  for  you, 
this  present  world  would  see  no  more  of 
me  forever.  The  sunshine  would  never 
fall  on  me  no  more  than  on  a  ghost. 
Once  in  a  while  people  might  discern 
my  figure  gliding  stealthily  through  the 


66  NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE 
dim  evening, —  that  would  be  all.  I 
should  be  only  a  shadow  of  the  night. 
It  is  you  that  give  me  reality  and  make 
all  things  real  for  me.  If,  in  the  inter 
val  since  I  quitted  this  lonely  old  cham 
ber,  I  had  found  no  woman  (and  you 
were  the  only  possible  one)  to  impart 
reality  and  significance  to  life,  I  should 
have  come  back  hither  ere  now  with 
a  feeling  that  all  was  a  dream  and  a 
mockery. "  .  .  . 

The  following  winter  was  also  passed 
at  Brook  Farm.  Hawthorne  was  no 
fair-weather  friend.  He  was  to  give  life 
at  the  community  a  true  trial.  Perhaps 
this  last  winter  of  his  single  life  could 
not  have  been  passed  under  better  au 
spices.  It  gave  him  opportunity  to 
frame  the  plan  of  his  future  existence, 
and  to  be  measurably  sure  that  he  felt 
the  ground  under  his  feet.  He  was  often 
found  in  the  autumnal  hours  of  musing 
leisure  stretched  upon  some  open  hill- 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE  67 
side;  and  once  lie  writes,  "Oh,  the 
beauty  of  grassy  slopes  and  the  hollow 
ways  of  paths  winding  between  hills,  and 
the  intervals  between  the  road  and  wood- 
lots,  where  summer  lingers  and  sits 
down,  strewing  gold  and  blue  asters  as 
her  parting  gifts  and  memorials  !  " 

He  wrote  afterwards  in  The  Blithedale 
Romance,  "I  found  myself  looking  for 
ward  to  years,  if  not  to  a  lifetime,  to  be 
spent  on  the  same  system;"  and  this, 
says  Mr.  Lathrop,  was,  in  fact,  his  atti 
tude.  A  little  time  before  his  marriage 
he  still  contemplated  buying  a  house- 
site  there  for  his  permanent  abode,  but 
he  came  to  an  adverse  decision. 


IV. 

UP  to  the  period  of  his  marriage,  in 
1842,  when  Hawthorne  was  thirty-eight 
years  old,  his  life  may  be  said  to  have 
passed  in  seclusion.  "We  need  scarcely  ex 
cept  the  months  spent  at  Brook  Farm, — 
an  experiment  of  living  which  now  oc 
cupies  a  sufficiently  prominent  place  in 
the  written  history  of  that  time,  although 
nearly  unknown  to  the  New  England 
people  in  general  while  it  existed,  and 
heard  of  rarely,  even  in  Boston,  except 
among  the  " come- outers.77 

At  the  end  of  the  second  year  of  his 
labors  at  Brook  Farm,  Hawthorne  broke 
his  connection  there,  leaving  the  one 
thousand  dollars  behind  him  which  he 
had  hopefully  invested  in  the  community, 
and  going  nearly  empty-handed,  but 
with  some  confidence  in  the  future  of  his 
literary  career,  to  Boston,  whence  he 
wrote  to  Sophia :  — 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE   69 

"MAY  27,  1842. 

"  Dearest  Heart, —  Your  letter  to  my 
sisters  was  most  beautiful, — sweet,  gentle, 
and  magnanimous;  such  as  no  one  but 
you  could  have  written.  If  they  do  not 
love  you,  it  must  be  because  they  have 
no  hearts  to  love  with  5  and,  even  if  this 
were  the  case,  I  should  not  despair  of 
your  planting  the  seeds  of  hearts  in  their 
bosoms.  ...  I  saw  Mr.  Emerson  at  the 
Athenaeum  yesterday  and  he  tells  me 
that  our  garden,  etc.,  makes  progress." 

Evidently,  it  had  been  decided  that 
Sophia  should  herself  open  the  question 
of  immediate  marriage  to  the  mother 
and  sisters,  before  Hawthorne  should 
see  them. 

He  writes  again,  June  9,  from  Salem : 
"  Scarcely  had  I  arrived  here,  when 
our  mother  came  out  of  her  chamber, 
looking  better  and  more  cheerful  than  I 
have  seen  her  this  some  time,  and  in 
quired  about  your  health  and  well-being, 


70  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE 
very  kindly,  too.  Then  was  my  heart 
much  lightened  ;  for  I  know  that  almost 
every  agitating  circumstance  of  her  life 
had  hitherto  cost  her  a  fit  of  sickness, 
and  I  knew  not  but  it  might  be  so  now. 
Foolish  me,  to  doubt  that  my  mother's 
love  could  be  wise,  like  all  other  genuine 
love !  And  foolish  again  to  have  doubted 
your  instinct, — whom,  henceforth  (if 
never  before),  I  take  for  my  unerring 
guide  and  counsellor  in  all  matters  of  the 
heart  and  soul.  .  .  .  We  can  already 
measure  the  interval  by  days  and  hours. 
What  happiness  !  and  what  awe  is  inter 
mingled  with  it !  —  no  fear  nor  doubt, 
but  a  holy  awe,  as  when  an  immortal 
spirit  is  drawing  near  to  the  gates  of 
Heaven."  .  .  . 

On  the  9th  of  July  the  ceremony  was 
performed  by  the  Rev.  James  Freeman 
Clarke  at  the  house  of  Miss  Peabody's 
parents  in  Boston.  By  a  strange  fortune, 
Mr.  Clarke  never  saw  them  again  until 
Hawthorne  lay  in  his  last  sleep. 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  71 
The  married  lovers  went  at  once  to 
their  own  home  in  the  Old  Manse  in  Con 
cord,  where  they  passed  nearly  four  bliss 
ful  years.  It  cost  little  to  live  in  those 
days,  in  the  country ;  and  Hawthorne 
wrote  and  published  busily.  He  con 
tributed  constantly  to  the  Democratic  Ee- 
vieWy  and  published  Mosses  from  an  Old 
Manse,  besides  editing  the  African  Jour 
nals  of  his  friend  Bridge  and  making  a 
second  volume  of  the  Twice-told  Tales. 

Now  "  being  happy, "  as  he  writes  of 
himself,  Hawthorne  was  really  able  to 
work.  Perhaps  The  Scarlet  Letter  was 
also  conceived  at  this  period ;  but  more 
than  ever  men  have  wondered  at  the 
thread  of  sad  imaginings  which  colored 
the  work  of  this  " happy'7  man.  His 
own  introduction  to  the  Mosses  de 
scribing  the  "Old  Manse"  has  the  fine 
veil  drawn  over  it  which  so  often  clothes 
the  English  landscape  and  the  heart 
which  has  known  sorrow.  "It  was 
here,"  he  writes,  "that  Emerson  wrote 


72  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE 
Nature  ;  for  he  was  then  an  inhabitant  of 
the  Manse,  and  used  to  watch  the  Assy 
rian  dawn  and  Paphian  sunset  and  inoon- 
rise  from  the  summit  of  our  eastern  hill. 
When  I  first  saw  the  room,  its  walls  were 
blackened  with  the  smoke  of  unnumbered 
years,  and  made  still  blacker  by  the  grim 
prints  of  Puritan  ministers  that  hung 
around.  .  .  .  The  rain  pattered  upon  the 
roof  and  the  sky  gloomed  through  the 
dusty  garret  windows  while  I  burrowed 
among  the  venerable  books  in  search  of 
any  living  thought.  ...  So  long  as  an 
unlettered  soul  can  attain  to  saving 
grace,  there  would  seem  to  be  no  deadly 
error  in  holding  theological  libraries  to 
be  accumulations  of,  for  the  most  part, 
stupendous  impertinence.  .  .  .  Genius  in 
deed  melts  many  pages  into  one,  and 
thus  effects  something  permanent.  ...  A 
work  of  genius  is  but  the  newspaper  of 
a  century,  or  perhaps  of  a  hundred 
centuries. ' ? 

And  thus  he  rambles  on,  chiefly  out  of 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  73 
doors  indeed,  leaving  the  reader  to  feel, 
between  the  lines,  the  calm  which  joy 
can  spread  over  the  poetic  spirit. 

Mrs.  Hawthorne  wrote  during  this 
idyllic  period:  "We  had  a  most  en 
chanting  time  during  Mary  the  cook's 
holiday  sojourn  in  Boston.  We  remained 
in  our  bower  undisturbed  by  mortal 
creature.  Mr.  Hawthorne  took  the  new 
phasis  of  housekeeper,  and,  with  that 
marvellous  power  of  adaptation  to  cir 
cumstances  that  he  possesses,  made  every 
thing  go  easily  and  well.  He  rose  be 
times  in  the  mornings  and  kindled  fires 
in  the  kitchen  and  breakfast  room,  and 
by  the  time  I  came  down  the  tea-kettle 
boiled  and  potatoes  were  baked  and  rice 
cooked,  and  my  lord  sat  with  a  book  su 
perintending. 7  7  .  .  . 

"APRIL  4,  1844. 

"My  dearest  Mother, — I  have  no  time, 
as  you  may  imagine.  I  am  baby's  tire 
woman,  hand-maiden,  and  tender,  as 


74  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE 
well  as  nursing  mother.  My  husband  re 
lieves  me  with  her  constantly,  and  gets  her 
to  sleep  beautifully.  .  .  .  The  other  day, 
when  my  husband  saw  me  contemplating 
an  appalling  vacuum  in  his  dressing- 
gown,  he  said  he  was  a  man  of  the  larg 
est  rents  in  the  country  and  it  was  strange 
he  had  not  more  ready  money.  .  .  .  But, 
somehow  or  other,  I  do  not  care  much, 
because  we  are  so  happy.  We 

'  Sail  away 
Into  the  regions  of  exceeding  Day,' 

and  the  shell  of  life  is  not  of  much  con 
sequence.  " 

The  prices  paid  Hawthorne  for  his 
work  were  so  very  small  that  he  found  it 
impossible  any  longer  to  support  his 
little  household  of  four  persons,  even  in 
Concord.  Again  Mr.  Pierce  and  Mr. 
Bridge  and  Mr.  O' Sullivan,  his  three 
devoted  friends,  came  to  the  rescue, 
and  were  able  at  last  to  get  for  him  the 


NATHANIEL   HAWTHOKNE    75 

position  of  surveyor  in  the  Salem  Cus 
tom-house. 

I  cannot  willingly  turn  this  page  in 
Hawthorne's  life  without  recalling  a  few 
of  his  own  delightful  descriptions  of  days 
passed  at  the  Old  Manse.  His  pages 
record  visits  and  encounters  with  Em 
erson,  and  walks  and  excursions 
with  Ellery  Channing  and  Thoreau. 
"Strange  and  happy  times  were  those," 
he  wrote,  "when  we  cast  aside  all  irk 
some  forms  and  strait-laced  habitudes, 
and  delivered  ourselves  up  to  the  free 
air,  to  live  like  the  Indians  or  any  less 
conventional  race,  during  one  bright 
semicircle  of  the  sun.  Bowing  our 
boat  against  the  current,  between  wide 
meadows,  we  turned  aside  into  the  Assa- 
beth.  A  more  lovely  stream  than  this, 
for  a  mile  above  its  junction  with  the 
Concord,  has  never  flowed  on  earth, — 
nowhere,  indeed,  except  to  lave  the  in 
terior  regions  of  a  poet's  imagina 
tion.  , 


76    NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE 

"  Never  was  a  poor  little  country  vil 
lage  infested  with  such  a  variety  of 
queer,  strangely  dressed,  oddly  behaved 
mortals,  most  of  whom  took  upon  them 
selves  to  be  important  agents  of  the 
world's  destiny,  yet  were  simply  bores 
of  a  very  intense  character. " 

"The  whole  passage,"  writes  Henry 
James,  "is  interesting;  and  it  suggests 
that  little  Concord  had  not  been  ill- 
treated  by  the  Fates, —  with  <a  great 
original  thinker '  at  one  end  of  the  vil 
lage,  an  exquisite  teller  of  tales  at  the 
other,  and  the  rows  of  New  England 
elms  between. " 

Of  Emerson,  Hawthorne  wrote  :  "  Be 
ing  happy,  I  felt  as  if  there  were  no 
question  to  put ;  and  I  therefore  admired 
him  as  a  poet  of  deep  beauty  and  aus 
tere  tenderness,  but  sought  nothing  from 
him  as  a  philosopher.  It  was  good, 
nevertheless,  to  meet  him  in  the  wood- 
paths,  or  sometimes  in  our  avenue,  with 
that  pure  intellectual  gleam  diffused 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE  77 
about  his  presence  like  the  garment  of  a 
shining  one ;  and  he,  so  quiet,  so  simple, 
so  without  pretension,  encountering  each 
man  alive  as  if  expecting  to  receive 
more  than  he  could  impart.  And,  in 
truth,  the  heart  of  many  an  ordinary 
man  had,  perchance,  inscriptions  which 
he  could  not  read.  But  it  was  impossi 
ble  to  dwell  in  his  vicinity  without  in 
haling  more  or  less  the  atmosphere  of  his 
lofty  thought. " 

But  the  moment  arrived  when  this 
beautiful  episode  must  come  to  an  end  ; 
and  as  such  changes,  however  painful, 
usually  have  at  the  moment  large  alle 
viations,  so  the  pressure  of  daily  need, 
which  Mrs.  Hawthorne  had  no  capability 
to  relieve,  made  the  way  seem  easy  for 
returning  with  a  fixed  income  to  his 
mother's  house  in  Salem.  He  went 
thither,  once  before  the  removal,  alone, 
and  passed  a  fortnight, — writing  in  his 
journal:  "I  resumed  all  my  bachelor 
habits,  leading  the  same  life  in  which 


78  NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE 
ten  years  of  my  youth  flitted  away  like 
a  dream.  But  how  much  changed  was 
I !  At  last  I  had  got  hold  of  a  reality 
which  could  never  be  taken  from  me. 
It  was  good  thus  to  get  apart  from  my 
happiness  for  the  sake  of  contemplat 
ing  it." 

This  capacity  for  " getting  apart" 
from  his  own  heart  and  life  is  the  key  to 
the  sombre  quality  of  his  genius.  It  is 
impossible  not  to  quote  here  the  words 
of  Mr.  James,  because  he  has  finally 
analyzed  this  question:  — 

"Our  writer's  imagination,"  he  says, 
"as  has  been  abundantly  conceded,  was 
a  gloomy  one.  The  old  Puritan  sense 
of  sin,  of  penalties  to  be  paid,  of  the 
darkness  and  wickedness  of  life,  had 
passed  into  it.  It  had  not  passed  into 
the  parts  of  Hawthorne's  nature  corre 
sponding  to  those  occupied  by  the  same 
horrible  vision  of  things  in  his  ancestors. 
But  it  had  still  been  determined  to  claim 
this  later  comer  as  its  own  5  and,  since  his 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE   79 

heart  and  his  happiness  were  to  escape, 
it  insisted  upon  setting  its  mark  upon  his 
genius, —  upon  his  most  beautiful  organ, 
his  admirable  fancy.  .  .  .  The  duskiest 
flowers  of  his  invention  sprang  straight 
from  the  soil  of  his  happiest  days.  .  .  . 
When  he  was  lightest  of  heart,  he  was 
most  creative  ;  and,  when  he  was  most 
creative,  the  moral  picturesqueness  of  the 
old  secret  of  mankind  in  general,  and 
of  the  Puritans  in  particular,  most  ap 
pealed  to  him." 

I  find  myself  still  lingering  over  the 
life  at  the  Old  Manse,  where  happiness 
was  tasted  in  its  perfect  pureness,  know 
ing  well  that  all  such  experience  belongs 
really  to  the  long  future,  to  the  bright 
eternity  in  which  they  both  firmly  be 
lieved.  Practically,  they  were  but 
poorly  furnished  against  the  "  slings  and 
arrows  of  outrageous  fortune. "  Know 
ing  little  of  the  conditions  of  the  larger 
world,  Mrs.  Hawthorne  was  easily  led  to 
consider  men  other  than  they  were,  and 


80  NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE 
Hawthorne  to  withdraw  himself  into  a 
deeper  mood  of  taciturnity  and  endur 
ance.  For  the  moment,  during  three  or 
four  happy  years,  their  solitude  and 
their  happiness  remained  complete.  Nor 
was  their  married  joy  less  at  any  period, 
but  the  cares  of  life  weighed  more 
heavily  upon  shoulders  little  fitted  to 
bear  them. 


V. 

THE  four  years  at  the  Old  Manse  were 
succeeded  by  four  years  in  Salem,  with 
the  exception  of  a  few  months  passed  in 
Boston,  where  their  son  Julian  was  born. 
Besides  the  house  in  Boston,  they  occu 
pied  three  successive  houses  in  Salem 
during  this  time,  at  last  settling  them 
selves  in  Mall  Street,  where  Hawthorne 
wrote  The  Scarlet  Letter,  or  finished  it, 
and  later  The  Snow  Image,  and  Other  Tales. 
Of  this  new  house,  Mrs.  Hawthorne 
wrote  to  her  mother:  "How  glad  you 
will  be,  dear  mother,  to  hear  that  we  are 
to  have  the  Mall  Street  house,  and  for 
two  hundred  dollars !  .  .  .  The  children 
will  have  a  grand  race- course  on  rainy 
days  from  the  end  of  the  chamber  to  the 
end  of  the  pantry.  My  husband's  study 
will  be  high  from  all  noise,  and  it  will 
be  to  me  a  Paradise  of  Peace  to  think  of 
him  alone  and  still  yet  within  my  reach. 
He  has  now  lived  in  the  nursery  a  year 


82  KATHASTIEL  HAWTHOBNE 
without  a  chance  for  one  hour's  unin 
terrupted  musing,  and  without  his  desk 
being  once  opened  !  He  —  the  heaven- 
gifted  seer  —  to  spend  his  life  between 
the  custom-house  and  the  nursery !  .  .  . 
It  will  be  very  pleasant  to  have  Madame 
Hawthorne  in  the  house.  Her  suite  of 
rooms  is  wholly  distinct  from  ours,  so 
that  we  shall  only  meet  when  we  choose 
to  do  so.  There  are  very  few  people  in 
the  world  whom  I  should  like  or  would 
consent  to  have  in  the  house  even  in  this 
way ;  but  Madame  Hawthorne  is  so  un- 
interfering,  of  so  much  delicacy,  that  I 
shall  never  know  she  is  near  excepting 
when  I  wish  it.  And  she  has  so  much 
kindness  and  sense  and  spirit  that  she 
will  be  a  great  resource  in  emergencies. 
Elizabeth  is  an  invisible  entity.  I  have 
seen  her  but  once  in  two  years,  and  Lou 
isa  never  intrudes.  ...  It  is  no  small 
satisfaction  to  know  that  Mrs.  Haw 
thorne's  remainder  of  life  will  be  glori 
fied  by  the  presence  of  these  children 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE    83 

and  of  her  own  son.  I  am  so  glad  to  win 
her  out  of  that  Castle  Dismal  and  from 
the  mysterious  chambers  into  which  no 
mortal  ever  peeped  till  Una  was  born 
and  Julian  ;  for  they  alone  have  en 
tered  the  penetralia.  Into  that  cham 
ber  the  sun  never  shines.  Into  these 
rooms  in  Mall  Street  it  blazes  without 
stint." 

In  the  winter  of  1849,  after  the  death 
of  Hawthorne's  mother,  described  most 
startlingly  with  the  strange,  bare  truth 
fulness  so  peculiar  to  him  in  his  journal, 
Mr.  Fields,  hearing  that  Hawthorne  was 
not  well  and  was  to  be  again  ejected 
from  the  custom-house,  —  if,  indeed,  that 
event  had  not  already  taken  place,  —  went 
to  Salem,  hoping  to  incite  him  to  pub 
lish  something  he  had  in  hand  or  to 
write,  in  order  to  keep  his  name  before 
the  public.  "I  found  him  alone,"  Mr. 
Fields  said,  "in  a  chamber  over  the 
sitting-room  of  the  dwelling  ;  and,  as 
the  day  was  cold,  he  was  hovering  near 


OFTH£ 

UNIVERSITY 


84  NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE 
a  stove.  We  fell  into  talk  about  his 
future  prospects  ;  and  he  was,  as  I  feared 
I  should  find  him,  in  a  very  desponding 
mood.  'Now/  said  I,  'is  the  time  for 
you  to  publish  5  for  I  know  during  these 
years  in  Salem  you  must  have  got  some 
thing  ready  for  the  press.'  'Nonsense  ! ' 
said  he :  '  what  heart  had  I  to  write 
anything,  when  my  publishers,  Monroe  & 
Company,  have  been  so  many  years  try 
ing  to  sell  a  small  edition  of  the  Twice- 
told  Tales  V  I  still  pressed  upon  him 
the  good  chances  he  would  have  now 
with  something  new.  '  Who  would  risk 
publishing  a  book  for  mej  the  most 
unpopular  writer  in  America V  'I 
would,'  said  I,  'and  would  start  with 
an  edition  of  two  thousand  copies  of 
anything  you  write.7  'What  mad 
ness  ! '  he  exclaimed.  '  Your  friend 
ship  for  me  gets  the  better  of  your  judg 
ment.  No,  no,'  he  continued,  'I 
have  no  money  to  indemnify  a  pub 
lisher's  losses  on  my  account.'  I  looked 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE  85 
at  my  watch,  and  found  that  the  train 
would  soon  be  starting  for  Boston  ;  and 
I  knew  there  was  not  much  time  to  lose 
in  trying  to  discover  what  had  been  his 
literary  work  during  these  last  few 
years  in  Salem.  I  remember  I  pressed 
him  to  reveal  to  me  what  he  had  been 
writing.  He  shook  his  head,  and  gave 
me  to  understand  he  had  produced 
nothing.  At  that  moment  I  caught 
sight  of  a  bureau,  or  chest  of  drawers, 
near  where  we  were  sitting,  and  imme 
diately  it  occurred  to  me  that  hidden 
away  somewhere  in  that  article  of  furni 
ture  was  a  story  or  stories  by  the  author 
of  the  Twice-told  Tales  ;  and  I  became  so 
positive  of  it  that  I  charged  him  vehe 
mently  with  the  fact.  He  seemed  sur 
prised,  I  thought,  but  shook  his  head 
again.  ...  I  was  hurrying  down  the 
stairs  when  he  called  after  me  from  the 
chamber,  asking  me  to  stop  a  moment. 
Then,  quickly  stepping  into  the  entry 
with  a  roll  of  manuscript  in  his  hands, 


86  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE 
he  said:  'How,  in  Heaven's  name,  did 
you  know  this  thing  was  there  f  As  you 
have  found  me  out,  take  what  I  have 
written  and  tell  me,  after  you  get  home 
and  have  time  to  read  it,  if  it  is  good  for 
anything.  It  is  either  very  good  or  very 
bad,  I  don't  know  which.'  On  my 
way  up  to  Boston  I  read  the  germ  of 
The  Scarlet  Letter.  Before  I  slept  that 
night,  I  wrote  him  a  note  all  aglow  with 
admiration.  .  .  .  We  soon  arranged  for 
his  appearance  again  before  the  public 
with  a  book.  ...  It  was  his  intention  to 
make  The  Scarlet  Letter  one  of  several 
short  stories,  all  to  be  included  in  one 
volume  and  called  'Old- time  Legends' ; 
.  .  .  but  I  persuaded  him,  after  reading 
the  first  chapters  of  the  story,  to  elabo 
rate  it,  and  publish  it  as  a  separate 
work."  Hawthorne  wrote  to  Mr. 
Fields:  "If  the  book  is  made  up  en 
tirely  of  The  Scarlet  Letter,  it  will  be  too 
sombre.  I  found  it  impossible  to  relieve 
the  shadows  of  the  story  with  so  much 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBKE  87 
light  as  I  would  gladly  have  throwii  in. 
Keeping  so  close  to  the  point  as  the  tale 
does,  and  diversified  no  otherwise  than 
by  turning  different  sides  of  the  same 
dark  idea  to  the  reader's  eye,  it  will 
weary  very  many  people  and  disgust 
some.  Is  it  safe,  then,  to  stake  the  fate 
of  the  book  entirely  on  this  one  chance? 
A  hunter  loads  his  gun  with  a  bullet  and 
several  buckshot ;  and,  following  his 
sagacious  example,  it  was  my  purpose  to 
conjoin  the  one  long  story  with  half  a 
dozen  shorter  ones,  so  that,  failing  to 
kill  the  public  outright  with  my  biggest 
and  heaviest  lump  of  lead,  I  might  have 
other  chances  with  the  smaller  bits,  in 
dividually  and  in  the  aggregate.  How 
ever,  I  am  willing  to  leave  these  con 
siderations  to  your  judgment,  and  should 
not  be  sorry  to  have  you  decide  for  the 
separate  publication."  Mr.  Fields' s 
decision  on  this  point  and  his  manage 
ment  of  the  business  had  much  to  do 
with  the  immediate  success  of  the  story. 


88    NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE 
Five  thousand  copies  were  sold  in  the 
first  ten  days,  and  the  author  was  at  last 
introduced  to  the  large  public  of  England 
and  America. 

Hawthorne  loved  and  trusted  his  pub 
lishers,  while  they  in  turn  were  generous 
to  him,  though  their  wishes  far  outran 
anything  they  could  do  for  him.  He 
wrote  to  Mr.  Fields  in  1860  :  "My  own 
opinion  is  that  I  am  not  really  a  popular 
writer,  and  that  what  popularity  I  have 
gained  is  chiefly  accidental  and  owing  to 
other  causes  than  my  own  kind  or  degree 
of  merit.  Possibly  I  may  (or  may  not) 
desire  something  better  than  popularity ; 
but,  looking  at  all  my  productions,  and 
especially  this  latter  one  [The  Marble 
Faun],  with  a  cold  or  critical  eye,  I 
can  see  they  do  not  make  their  appeal 
to  the  popular  mind."  This  was  emi 
nently  true  in  that  day  as  in  our  own  ; 
and  all  the  devotion  of  his  publishers — 
proved  by  the  constant  reprinting  of  his 
books  in  varying  forms,  by  newspaper 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE   89 

articles,  by  private  letters  and  conversa 
tions —  was  needed  to  create  the  popu 
larity  lie  achieved.  Hawthorne  was 
neither  unmindful  nor  inappreciative 
of  the  friendship  of  his  publishers.  He 
responded  in  the  most  loyal  fashion, 
writing  once  to  Mr.  Fields:  "I  care 
more  for  your  good  opinion  than  for  that 
of  a  host  of  critics,  and  have  an  excellent 
reason  for  so  doing,  inasmuch  as  my 
literary  success,  whatever  it  has  been  or 
may  be,  is  the  result  of  my  connection 
with  you.  Somehow  or  other,  you 
smote  the  rock  of  public  sympathy  in 
my  behalf,  and  a  stream  gushed  forth  in 
sufficient  quantity  to  quench  my  thirst, 
though  not  to  drown  me.  I  think  no 
other  author  can  ever  have  had  a  pub 
lisher  that  he  valued  so  much  as  I  do 
mine.'7 

The  Scarlet  Letter  was  published  in 
April,  1850  ;  and  in  the  early  summer 
of  the  same  year  Hawthorne  moved  to 
Lenox  with  his  family.  His  Introduc- 


90  NATHANIEL  HAWTHORKE 
tion,  called  "The  Custom-house/'  gave 
great  offence  to  his  contemporaries, —  a 
fact  which  seems  to  our  generation  suf 
ficiently  incredible  until  we  remember 
that  Hawthorne  was  really  writing  to 
living  men  and  women  of  things  as  they 
were,  he  being  a  man,  after  all,  among 
men.  The  aloofness  of  his  nature  made 
it  impossible  for  him,  in  the  confidence 
with  which  an  author  converses  with  his 
public,  to  think  of  himself  as  really  a 
part  of  the  living  phantasmagoria  he 
saw  about  him.  Neither  did  he  love  to 
consider  himself  as  without  the  pale  of 
human  sympathies;  but  his  sad  inheri 
tance  was  too  much  for  him.  He  was, 
indeed,  a  man  apart,  and,  without  being 
conscious  of  the  effect,  described  the 
ancient  adherents  of  the  custom-house 
service  and  the  signs  of  decay  in  Salem 
with  the  terrible  keenness  and  truth  of 
one  who  had  dropped  there  from  another 
planet.  He  did  not  love  these  appar 
ently  unsympathetic  qualities  in  himself, 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBSTE  91 
and,  doubtless,  in  hours  of  despondence, 
recalled  the  words  of  Milton  in  the  Areo- 
pagitica:  "I  cannot  praise  a  fugitive 
and  cloistered  virtue,  unexercised  and 
unbreathed,  that  never  sallies  out  and 
sees  her  adversary,  but  slinks  out  of  the 
race,  where  that  immortal  garland  is  to 
be  run  for,  not  without  dust  and  heat." 

But  we  must  do  Hawthorne  justice. 
He  was  laboring  under  uncounted  diffi 
culties  in  coming  to  share  the  world's 
work.  Bancroft,  as  we  have  seen, 
thought  him  a  very  superior  officer ; 
and  there  is  a  legend  in  Salem  still  that 
he  was  quite  as  severe  as  the  keenest 
master  could  have  desired,  and,  for  that 
reason,  not  altogether  loved  by  the  men 
under  him.  I  must  confess  this  seems  to 
me  very  high  praise,  and  to  corroborate 
Bancroft's  appreciation,  when  we  think 
of  the  musty  condition  of  political  offices 
at  that  period. 

But  such  a  disposition,  coupled  with 
the  taciturnity  of  Hawthorne,  could 


92    NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE 
never  make  him  popular ;  and  the  end 
of  the  Introduction  to  The  Scarlet  Letter 
has  a  sad  and  "  dying  fall "  :  — 

"Soon  my  native  town  will  loom  upon 
me  through  the  haze  of  memory,  a  mist 
brooding  over  and  around  it,  as  if  it 
were  no  portion  of  the  real  earth,  but  an 
overgrown  village  in  cloud-land,  with 
only  imaginary  inhabitants  to  people  its 
wooden  houses,  and  walk  its  homely 
lanes  and  the  unpicturesque  prolixity  of 
its  main  street.  Henceforth  it  ceases  to 
be  a  reality  of  my  life.  I  am  a  citizen 
of  somewhere  else.  My  good  towns 
people  will  not  much  regret  me ;  for  — 
though  it  has  been  as  dear  an  object  as 
any,  in  my  literary  efforts,  to  be  of  some 
importance  in  their  eyes,  and  to  win 
myself  a  pleasant  memory  in  this  abode 
and  burial-place  of  so  many  of  my  fore 
fathers — there  has  never  been  for  me 
the  genial  atmosphere  which  a  literary 
man  requires,  in  order  to  ripen  the  best 
harvest  of  his  mind." 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE    93 

The  Scarlet  Letter  having  brought 
Hawthorne  the  world-wide  fame  which 
holds  so  justly  to  this  day,  while  the 
Introduction  drew  down  upon  him  the 
additional  dislike  of  his  townspeople, 
he  accepted  the  offer  of  a  small  cottage 
in  Lenox,  and  immediately  withdrew 
himself  permanently  from  Salem. 

To  show  how  unconscious  Hawthorne 
was  of  any  expression  of  acerbity  re 
specting  his  custom-house  experiences, 
he  writes  to  Mr.  Fields  with  regard  to 
this  Introduction,  "In  the  process  of 
writing,  all  political  and  official  turmoil 
has  subsided  within  me,  so  that  I  have 
not  felt  inclined  to  execute  justice  on 
any  of  my  enemies.'7 

Of  The  Scarlet  Letter  itself,  and  the 
position  he  gained  by  it,  Henry  James 
says:  — 

"The  book  was  the  finest  piece  of  im 
aginative  writing  yet  put  forth  in  the 
country.  There  was  a  consciousness  of 
this  in  the  welcome  that  was  given  it, — 


94    NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE 
a  satisfaction   in  the  idea  of  America 
having  produced  a  novel  that  belonged 
to  literature,  and  to  the  forefront  of  it." 

Even  in  the  briefest  study  of  the  life 
and  work  of  Hawthorne,  he  must  always 
be  considered  as  the  great  romancer, — 
not  as  a  man  among  men,  who  one  day 
wrote  a  story.  We  have  only  to  turn  to 
SewalPs  Diary,  written  at  the  period 
with  which  Hawthorne  deals,  to  see  what 
New  England  was  in  the  eyes  of  the 
prosaic  judge,  who  was  recording  events 
as  they  occurred.  Although  Hawthorne 
wrote  historical  sketches,  biography,  and 
autobiography,  and  kept  his  own  ex 
traordinary  note-books,  telling  the  truth 
from  his  own  standpoint  fearlessly,  there 
was  always,  as  it  were,  a  swaying  veil 
between  him  and  what  are  called  the 
realities  of  life. 

The  same  Salem  that  failed  to  nourish 
his  imagination,  and  that  appeared  to 
him  so  devoid  of  elements  necessary  to 
any  true  existence,  was,  in  reality,  as  we 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  95 
have  seen,  a  very  pretty  town  containing 
a  small  group  of  cultivated  persons  who 
were  sincerely  appreciative  of  their 
great  writer. 

Miss  Burley,  with  her  library,  her 
wisdom,  and  her  generosities,  is  still 
remembered;  and,  like  Mrs.  Lyman, 
of  Northampton,  and  other  intelligent 
women  of  other  towns, — Mrs.  Ripley,  of 
Concord,  being  among  the  first, — was 
helping  to  give  a  new  tone  to  the  new 
generation.  But  Hawthorne  felt  that  to 
subject  himself  to  adulation  on  the  one 
hand  and  to  provincial  criticism  on  the 
other  would  cause  him  to  breathe  an 
atmosphere  which  would  stifle  him  in 
the  end.  Nevertheless,  he  possessed  that 
inexplicable  instinct  which  holds  us  to 
our  native  soil,  in  no  common  degree. 
His  son  says,  "  After  freeing  himself 
from  Salem,  he  never  found  any  perma 
nent  rest  anywhere." 

He  was  artist  and  romancer  to  the 
full ;  and,  so  soon  as  the  oppressive  light 


96  KATHANIEL  HAWTHOBKE 
of  noon  peered  into  his  domain  where- 
ever  he  might  be,  he  fled  away  again 
into  the  shadow.  His  daughter  says, 
"He  loved  his  art  more  than  his 
time,  more  than  his  ease,  and  could 
thrust  into  the  flames  an  armful  of 
manuscript  because  he  suspected  the 
pages  of  weakness  and  exaggeration. " 

The  year  and  a  half  passed  in  "the 
little  red  house "  in  Lenox,  whither  he 
had  been  hospitably  beckoned,  was  the 
season  of  his  greatest  intellectual  activ 
ity,  following  as  it  did  his  first  moment 
of  real  success.  He  thought  he  found  it 
hard  to  write  with  such  a  magnificent 
panorama  of  hill  and  lake  country  con 
stantly  inviting  the  eye  ;  but  during  this 
time  he  wrote  and  published  The  House 
of  the  Seven  Gables  and  A  Wonder  Boole 
for  Children,  the  latter  being  entirely 
written  in  six  weeks.  He  wrote  to  Mr. 
Fields  concerning  The  House  of  the  Seven 
Gables:  "I  write  diligently,  but  not  so 
rapidly  as  I  had  hoped.  I  find  the  book 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKSTE  97 
requires  more  care  and  thought  than 
The  Scarlet  Letter;  also,  I  have  to  wait 
oftener  for  a  mood."  After  sending  the 
manuscript,  he  says:  "If  you  do  not 
receive  it,  you  may  conclude  that  it  has 
miscarried,  in  which  case  I  shall  not 
consent  to  the  universe  existing  one 
moment  longer.  I  have  no  copy  of  it, 
except  the  wildest  scribble  of  a  first 
draught,  so  that  it  could  never  be  re 
stored.  It  has  met  with  extraordinary 
success  from  that  portion  of  the  public 
to  whose  judgment  it  has  been  sub 
mitted  5  namely,  from  my  wife.  I  like 
wise  prefer  it  to  The  Scarlet  Letter ;  but 
an  author's  opinion  of  his  book  just  after 
completing  it  is  worth  little  or  nothing, 
he  being  then  in  the  hot  or  cold  fit  of  a 
fever,  and  certain  to  rate  it  too  high  or 
too  low." 

It  was  at  Lenox,  also,  that  his  third 
and  youngest  child  was  born.  During 
that  summer  Hawthorne  determined  to 
leave  Lenox,  the  cottage  being  much  too 


98  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBKE 
small  for  his  larger  family.  In  vain 
Mrs.  Kemble  offered  them  her  own 
beautiful  house  free  of  rent  for  the  com 
ing  year.  Hawthorne  could  never  bring 
himself  to  accept  such  benefits ;  nor  even, 
when  she  proposed  to  receive  the  same 
rent  he  was  paying  for  the  red  cottage, 
would  he  consent.  Mrs.  Hawthorne 
wrote  to  her  mother,  "I  was  more 
troubled  at  the  hindrance  Mr.  Haw 
thorne  suffered  by  our  being  without 
help  a  fortnight  than  by  anything  else, 
because  he  would  not  let  me  bear  any 
weight  of  care  or  labor,  but  insisted 
upon  doing  everything  himself.  Yet  he 
says  he  cannot  write  deeply  during  mid 
summer,  at  any  rate.  He  can  only 
seize  the  skirts  of  ideas,  and  pin  them 
down  for  further  investigation.  Be 
sides,  he  has  not  recovered  his  pristine 
vigor.  The  year  ending  in  June  was 
the  trying  year  of  his  life,  as  well  as  of 
mine,  on  account  of  political  calumny. 
I  have  not  yet  found  again  all  my  wings, 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE  99 

neither  is  his  tread  yet  again  elastic. 
But  the  ministrations  of  nature  will  have 
their  effect  in  due  time.  Mr.  Hawthorne 
thinks  it  is  Salem  which  he  is  dragging 
at  his  ankles  still. 

"We  find  kindest  friends  on  every 
side.  The  truest  friendliness  is  the  great 
characteristic  of  the  Sedgwick  family  in 
all  its  branches.  They  really  take  the 
responsibility  of  my  being  comfortable. 
We  have  fallen  into  the  arms  of  loving- 
kindness.  Mr.  Tappan  is  a  horn  of 
benefits.  His  shy,  dark  eyes  are  always 
gleaming  with  hospitable  smiles  for  us." 

Hawthorne  wrote  to  Mr.  Pike,  an  old 
comrade,  from  Lenox,  July,  1851  (at  the 
same  time  that  his  wife  wrote,  "Mr. 
Hawthorne  has  but  just  stepped  over  the 
threshold  of  a  hermitage :  he  is  but 
just  not  a  hermit  still "):  "What  a  sad 
account  you  give  of  your  solitude !  I 
am  not  likely  ever  to  have  the  feeling 
of  loneliness  you  express  5  and  I  most 
heartily  wish  you  would  take  measures 


100  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE 
to  remedy  it  in  your  own  case,  by  marry 
ing  Miss  Brookhouse  or  somebody  else 
as  soon  as  possible.  If  I  were  at  all  in 
the  habit  of  shedding  tears,  I  should 
have  felt  inclined  to  do  so  at  your  de 
scription  of  your  present  situation, — 
without  family  and  estranged  from  your 
former  friends. 

"The  most  important  news  I  have  to 
tell  you  is  that  we  have  another  daugh 
ter,  now  about  two  months  old.  She  is 
a  very  bright  and  healthy  child,  and 
neither  more  nor  less  handsome  than 
babies  generally  are.  I  think  I  feel 
more  interest  in  her  than  I  did  in  the 
other  children  at  the  same  age,  from  the 
consideration  that  she  is  to  be  the  daugh 
ter  of  my  age, —  the  comfort  (at  least,  so 
it  is  to  be  hoped)  of  my  declining  years, 
—the  last  child  whom  I  expect  or  intend 
to  have. 

"  Whenever  you  feel  your  solitude 
quite  intolerable  (and  I  can  hardly  help 
wishing  that  it  may  become  so  soon),  do 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE  101 
come  to  me.  By  the  way>  if  J  cojitinujB 
to  prosper  as  heretofore  ft*  it©  iiterary 
line,  I  shall  soon  be>in  <a  condition; -toe 
buy  a  place ;  and,  if  year  should*  heeCr  of  ~ 
one,  say,  worth  from  fifteen  hundred  to 
two  thousand  dollars,  I  wish  you  would 
keep  your  eye  on  it  for  me.  I  should 
wish  it  to  be  on  the  seacoast  or,  at  all 
events,  with  easy  access  to  the  sea.  .  .  . 
I  find  I  do  not  feel  at  home  among  these 
hills,  and  should  not  like  to  consider 
myself  permanently  settled  here.  I  do 
not  get  acclimated  to  the  peculiar  state 
of  the  atmosphere  ;  and,  except  in  mid 
winter,  I  am  continually  catching  cold, 
and  am  none  so  vigorous  as  I  used  to  be 
on  the  seacoast.  The  same  is  the  case 
with  my  wife ;  and,  though  the  children 
seem  perfectly  well,  yet  I  rather  think 
they  would  flourish  better  near  the  sea. 
Say  nothing  about  my  wishes ;  but,  if 
you  see  a  place  likely  to  suit  me,  let  me 
know.  I  shall  be  in  Salem  probably  as 
soon  as  October. ?? 


102  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE 

.s  Lowell  wrote  to  Hawthorne  after  the 
publication  of,  The  House  of  the  Seven 
GMes:  ('  I  cannot  help  believing  it  a  great 
trianiph  that  you  snould  have  been  able 
to  deepen  and  widen  the  impression  made 
by  such  a  book  as  The  Scarlet  Letter. 
It  seems  to  me  that  the  " House"  is  the 
most  valuable  contribution  to  New  Eng 
land  history  that  has  been  made.  .  .  . 
Yesterday  is  commonly  looked  upon  and 
written  about  as  of  no  kin  to  to-day, 
though  the  one  is  legitimate  child  of  the 
other,  and  has  its  veins  filled  with  the 
same  blood.  And  the  chapter  about 

•  Alice  and  the  carpenter, — Salem,  which 
would  not  even  allow  you  so  much  as 
Scotland  gave  Burns,  will  build  you  a 
monument  yet  for  having  shown  that 
she  did  not  hang  her  witches  for  nothing. 
I  suppose  the  true  office  of  the  historian 
is  to  reconcile  the  present  with  the  past." 
Hawthorne's  letters  to  Mr.  Fields,  dur 
ing  his  sojourn  in  Lenox,  are  long  and 
intimate.  Delightful  extracts  from  them 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE  103 

may  be  read  in  the  Yesterdays  with  Au 
thors  ;  but,  except  where  they  bear  imme 
diately  upon  his  life,  they  are  too  long 
to  be  inserted  here.  He  speaks  in  them 
of  the  value  of  a  true  reviewer,  saying 
that  "  Whipple's  notices  have  done  more 
than  pleased  me,  for  they  have  helped 
me  to  see  my  book."  He  was  much 
pestered  by  members  of  a  real  Pyncheon 
family  turning  up,  each  one  more  indig 
nant  than  the  last  at  the  portrayal  of 
their  ancestral  family,  as  they  insisted 
upon  calling  it,  in  Hawthorne's  story. 
"The  joke  of  the  matter  is,"  he  wrote, 
"that  I  never  heard  of  his  grandfather, 
nor  knew  that  any  Pyncheons  had  ever 
lived  in  Salem,  but  took  the  name  be 
cause  it  suited  the  tone  of  my  book,  and 
was  as  much  my  property,  for  fictitious 
purposes,  as  that  of  Smith." 

Tanglewood  Tales  and  The  Snow  Image, 
and  Other  Stories,  were  evidently  in  hand 
that  year  before  he  came  to  Boston  in 
the  autumn.  He  speaks  in  one  letter 


104  NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE 
of  wishing  to  send  a  sketch  of  the  veri 
table  porch  of  Tanglewood,  ( '  but  my  wife 
has  been  too  unwell  to  draw  it." 

"Mrs.  Kemble,"  he  continues,  " writes 
very  good  accounts  from  London  of  the 
reception  which  my  two  romances  have 
met  with  there.  She  says  that  they  have 
made  a  greater  sensation  than  any  book 
since  Jane  Eyre ;  but  probably  she  is  a 
little,  or  a  good  deal,  too  emphatic  in  her 
representation  of  the  matter." 

It  was  thus  in  the  full  tide  of  produc 
tion,  but  weary  of  Lenox,  that  Haw 
thorne  brought  his  family  back  to  Boston 
in  the  late  autumn.  "  Please  God," 
he  says  to  Mr.  Fields,  September,  1851, 
"I  mean  to  look  you  in  the  face  towards 
the  end  of  next  week  5  at  all  events, 
within  ten  days.  I  have  stayed  here  too 
long  and  too  constantly.  To  tell  you  a 
secret,  I  am  sick  to  death  of  Berkshire, 
and  hate  to  think  of  spending  another 
winter  here." 

A  black  mood  had  fallen  upon  him. 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  105 
He  fancied  he  could  not  get  away ;  but 
during  Mrs.  Hawthorne's  absence  in  the 
summer,  with  her  two  daughters,  whom 
she  brought  to  visit  her  mother  in  West 
Newton,  they  had  evidently  arranged  to 
come  and  pass  the  winter  in  her  neigh 
borhood,  if  possible.  On  the  21st  of  No 
vember,  1851,  the  family  finally  flitted 
away  from  Berkshire.  It  was  none  too 
soon,  for  Hawthorne  had  come  to  detest 
the  spot  with  no  common  hatred.  West 
Newton  was  surely  as  strong  a  contrast 
as  could  be  found  to  the  beauty  of  Lenox  ; 
but  The  Bliihedale  Romance  was  in  the  air, 
and  Hawthorne  seated  himself  promptly 
to  his  task,  which  was  completed  in  five 
months. 

His  next  business  was  to  find  a  spot 
for  a  home.  He  turned  to  Concord, 
naturally  enough  after  those  first  happy 
years,  and  presently  bought  a  cottage 
there  which  he  called  "The  Wayside." 
He  wrote  to  Mr.  Fields,  who  was  then  in 
England  :  < '  How  do  you  like  the  name  of 


106  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE 

my  estate  1  My  drafts  have  been  pretty 
heavy  of  late,  in  consequence  of  fitting 
up  my  house.  You  have  got  just  one 
hundred  and  fifty  pounds  more  than  I 
expected  to  receive.  It  will  come  in 
good  time,  too. 

"I  meant  to  have  written  another  Won 
der  Book  this  summer,  but  another  task 
has  unexpectedly  intervened.  General 
Pierce,  of  New  Hampshire,  the  Demo 
cratic  nominee  for  the  Presidency,  was 
a  college  friend  of  mine,  as  you  know ; 
and  we  have  been  intimate  through  life. 
He  wishes  me  to  write  his  biography, 
and  I  have  consented  to  do  so  5  somewhat 
reluctantly,  however,  for  Pierce  has  now 
reached  that  altitude  when  a  man,  care 
ful  of  his  personal  dignity,  will  begin  to 
think  of  cutting  his  acquaintance.  But 
I  seek  nothing  from  him,  and  therefore 
need  not  be  ashamed  to  tell  the  truth  of 
an  old  friend." 

The  three  most  fruitful  years  of  Haw 
thorne's  life  thus  drew  to  an  end.  They 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  107 
show  an  admirable  record  for  any  author 
in  that  space  of  time. 

Although  Hawthorne  sought  nothing 
of  Pierce,  it  had  doubtless  long  been  the 
first  desire  of  his  friend  to  smooth  Haw 
thorne's  path  whenever  it  should  be  in 
his  power.  Upon  Mr.  Fields' s  return 
from  England  he  found  Hawthorne  in 
Concord,  but  already  thinking  of  the 
Liverpool  consulship.  "He  seemed 
happy  at  the  thought  of  flitting,  but 
I  wondered  if  he  could  possibly  be  as 
contented  across  the  water  as  he  was  in 
Concord." 

In  June,  Hawthorne  sailed  away  with 
his  family  to  Liverpool.  "  My  ancestor 
left  England,"  he  wrote,  "in  1630.  I 
return  in  1853.  I  sometimes  feel  as  if 
I  myself  had  been  absent  these  two  hun 
dred  and  twenty-three  years,  leaving 
England  just  emerging  from  the  feudal 
system,  and  finding  it,  on  my  return,  on 
the  verge  of  republicanism." 


VI. 

THE  greater  part  of  the  next  five 
years  was  spent  in  Liverpool  in  the  busi 
ness  of  the  consulate.  This,  of  course, 
was  not  conducive  to  romance-writing  ; 
but  Hawthorne  at  once  began  a  series 
of  English  Note-books.  In  his  last  letter 
before  leaving  England,  at  the  close 
of  the  year  1857,  he  wrote  Mr.  Fields  : 
* i  I  made  up  a  huge  package  the  other 
day,  consisting  of  seven  closely  written 
volumes  of  journal  kept  by  me  since  my 
arrival  in  England,  and  filled  with 
sketches  of  places  and  men  and  manners, 
many  of  which  would  doubtless  be  very 
delightful  to  the  public.  I  think  I 
shall  seal  them  up,  with  directions  in 
my  will  to  have  them  opened  and  pub 
lished  a  century  hence ;  and  your  firm 
shall  have  the  refusal  of  them.7' 

These  journals  eventually,  upon  Haw 
thorne's  return  to  America,  were  of 
course  opened  5  and  the  volume  called 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE  109 
Our  Old  Home  was  drawn  from  them. 
Also,  some  years  later,  Hawthorne's 
English  Note-books,  made  of  extracts  from 
these  volumes,  were  published.  They 
give  such  an  admirable  autobiographical 
view  of  Hawthorne  that,  however  great 
the  temptation  may  be  to  continue  the 
interesting  details  of  his  life  in  a  new 
form,  it  would  be  but  useless  labor. 
Eeleased  from  cares  of  office  in  England 
after  four  years  of  service,  Hawthorne 
joyfully  turned  his  face  southward  to 
the  Continent,  pausing  as  briefly  as  pos 
sible  on  his  way  to  Italy,  whence  he 
wrote  as  follows  to  Mr.  Fields  :  — 

"  VILLA  MONTAUTO,  NEAR  FLORENCE, 
"  Sept.  3,  1858. 

"  Dear  Fields, —  I  am  afraid  I  have 
staid  away  too  long,  and  am  forgotten 
by  everybody.  You  have  piled  up  the 
dusty  remnants  of  my  editions,  I  sup 
pose,  in  that  chamber  over  the  shop, 
where  you  once  took  me  to  smoke  a 


110  NATHANIEL   HAWTHOBKE 

cigar,  and  have  crossed  iny  name  out  of 
your  list  of  authors  without  so  much  as 
asking  whether  I  am  dead  or  alive.  But 
I  like  it  well  enough,  nevertheless.  It 
is  pleasant  to  feel  at  last  that  I  am  really 
away  from  America, — a  satisfaction  that 
I  never  enjoyed  as  long  as  I  staid  in  Liv 
erpool,  where  it  seemed  to  me  that  the 
quintessence  of  nasal  and  hand-shaking 
Yankeedorn  was  continually  filtered  and 
sublimated  through  my  consulate,  on  the 
way  outward  and  homeward.  I  first  got 
acquainted  with  my  own  countrymen 
there.  At  Rome,  too,  it  was  not  much 
better.  But  here  in  Florence,  and  in 
the  summer  time,  and  in  this  secluded 
villa,  I  have  escaped  out  of  all  my  old 
tracks,  and  am  really  remote. 

"I  like  my  present  residence  im 
mensely.  The  house  stands  on  a  hill, 
overlooking  Florence,  and  is  big  enough 
to  quarter  a  regiment,  insomuch  that 
each  member  of  the  family,  including 
servants,  has  a  separate  suite  of  apart- 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOENE  111 

merits,  and  there  are  vast  wildernesses 
of  upper  rooms  into  which  we  have 
never  yet  sent  exploring  expeditions. 
At  one  end  of  the  house  there  is  a 
moss  -  grown  tower,  haunted  by  owls 
and  by  the  ghost  of  a  monk,  who  was 
confined  there  in  the  thirteenth  cen 
tury,  previous  to  being  burnt  at  the 
stake  in  the  principal  square  of  Florence. 
I  hire  this  villa,  tower  and  all,  at  twenty- 
eight  dollars  a  month ;  but  I  mean  to 
take  it  away  bodily  and  clap  into  a  ro 
mance,  which  I  have  in  my  head  ready 
to  be  written  out. 

' i  Speaking  of  romances,  I  have  planned 
two,  one  or  both  of  which  I  could  have 
ready  for  the  press  in  a  few  months  if  I 
were  either  in  England  or  America. 
But  I  find  this  Italian  atmosphere  not 
favorable  to  the  close  toil  of  composi 
tion,  although  it  is  a  very  good  air  to 
dream  in.  I  must  breathe  the  fogs  of  old 
England  or  the  east  winds  of  Massachu 
setts  in  order  to  put  me  into  working 


112  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE 
trim.  Nevertheless,  I  shall  endeavor 
to  be  busy  during  the  coming  winter  at 
Borne ;  but  there  will  be  so  much  to  dis 
tract  my  thoughts  that  I  have  little  hope 
of  seriously  accomplishing  anything.  It 
is  a  pity  ;  for  I  have  really  a  plethora  of 
ideas,  and  should  feel  relieved  by  dis 
charging  some  of  them  upon  the  public. 
"  We  shall  continue  here  till  the  end 
of  this  month,  and  shall  then  return  to 
Borne,  where  I  have  already  taken  a 
house  for  six  months.  In  the  middle 
of  April  we  intend  to  start  for  home  by 
the  way  of  Geneva  and  Paris,  and,  after 
spending  a  few  weeks  in  England,  sha!2 
embark  for  Boston  in  July  or  the  begin 
ning  of  August.  After  so  long  an  ab 
sence  (more  than  five  years  already, 
which  will  be  six  before  you  see  me  at 
the  old  '  Corner ?),  it  is  not  altogether 
delightful  to  think  of  returning.  Every 
body  will  be  changed,  and  I  myself,  no 
doubt,  as  much  as  anybody.  Tieknor 
and  you,  I  suppose,  were  both  upset  in 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  113 

the  late  religious  earthquake ;  and,  when 
I  inquire  for  you,  the  clerks  will  direct 
me  to  the  i  Business  Men's  Conference.' 
It  won't  do.  I  shall  be  forced  to  come 
back  again  and  take  refuge  in  a  London 
lodging.  London  is  like  the  grave  in 
one  respect, — any  man  can  make  himself 
at  home  there ;  and,  whenever  a  man 
finds  himself  homeless  elsewhere,  he  had 
better  either  die  or  go  to  London. 

"  Speaking  of  the  grave  reminds  me  of 
old  age  and  other  disagreeable  matters  ; 
and  I  would  remark  that  one  grows  old 
in  Italy  twice  or  three  times  as  fast  as  in 
other  countries.  I  have  three  gray  hairs 
now  for  one  that  I  brought  from  Eng 
land  ;  and  I  shall  look  venerable  indeed 
by  next  summer,  when  I  return.  .  .  . 

6  i  Eemember  me  affectionately  to  all  my 
friends.  Whoever  has  a  kindness  for  me 
may  be  assured  that  I  have  twice  as 
much  for  him.  .  .  . 

"Your  friend, 

"NATH.  HAWTHORNE." 


114  NATHANIEL   HAWTHOBNE 

The  winter  of  1859  was  passed  in 
Borne,  where,  although  his  own  health 
was  excellent,  and  he  was  able  at  first  to 
make  some  memoranda  for  the  new  story, 
his  Marble  Faun,  which  he  had  dreamed 
into  existence  at  the  Villa  Montauto,  he 
was  soon  fatally  interrupted  by  the  ill 
ness  of  his  family.  His  daughter  Una 
was  attacked  by  the  Bornan  fever,  which, 
in  the  end,  affected  her  brain.  Haw 
thorne  suffered  as  much  as  it  is  possible 
to  suffer  during  the  dreary  months 
of  that  uncertain  disease,  and  he  never 
really  recovered  from  the  strain.  It  was 
a  dark  valley  through  which  he  walked, 
and  we  can  readily  understand  his  writ 
ing  to  Mr.  Fields  :  — 

1  i  I  bitterly  detest  Borne,  and  shall  re- 
joice  to  bid  it  farewell  forever  ;  and  I 
fully  acquiesce  in  all  the  mischief  and 
ruin  that  has  happened  to  it,  from  Nero's 
conflagration  downward.  In  fact,  I  wish 
the  very  site  had  been  obliterated  before 
I  ever  saw  it. ?  ?  He  decided  to  return  to 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE  115 
England  as  soon  as  practicable,  with  the 
intention  of  returning  home,  but  wrote 
again  from  Rome  :  "  I  shall  go  home,  I 
fear,  with  a  heavy  heart,  not  expecting 
to  be  very  well  contented  there.  ...  If  I 
were  but  a  hundred  times  richer  than  I 
am,  how  very  comfortable  I  could  be  !  I 
consider  it  a  great  piece  of  good  fortune 
that  I  have  had  experience  of  the  discom 
forts  and  miseries  of  Italy,  and  did  not 
go  directly  home  from  England.  ...  If 
I  had  but  a  house  fit  to  live  in,  I  should 
be  greatly  more  reconciled  to  coming 
home  ;  but  I  am  really  at  a  loss  to  imag 
ine  how  we  are  going  to  squeeze  ourselves 
into  that  little  old  cottage  of  mine." 

Instead  of  returning  at  once  to  Amer 
ica,  Hawthorne  again  settled  down  in 
England  with  the  determination  of  pre 
paring  The  Marble  Faun  for  the  press. 
Leamington  proved  to  be  a  most  comfort 
able  abode,  and  he  wrote  steadily  here 
until  his  health  suffered  from  the  strain. 
Then  he  went  to  Eedcar,  on  the  northeast 


116  NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE 
coast,  not  far  from  Whitby,  where  the 
bracing  air  restored  him.  He  remained 
four  months  at  Bedcar,  walking  about 
the  stormy  shores  of  that  neighborhood, 
until  the  wild  wintry  weather  drove  him 
away.  Then  the  family  returned  to  pass 
the  winter  in  Leamington  and  Bath.  It 
was  a  dull,  dark  season,  and  Hawthorne 
was  almost  without  outside  companions 
save  when  he  took  an  occasional  brief 
trip  to  London.  But  Smith  &  Elder 
had  paid  him  generously  for  his  new 
story,  which  was  going  through  the 
press  5  and,  except  for  the  exhaustion 
caused  by  the  writing  of  the  book  and 
his  sad  Boman  experience,  he  was,  on 
the  whole,  as  well  situated  as  possible. 
Mr.  Fields  was  on  the  Continent  him 
self  during  the  winter  ;  and  Hawthorne 
wrote  frequently,  making  cheerful  plans 
for  an  early  meeting  and  a  return  home 
together  during  the  summer  of  1860. 

1 '  We  met  in  London  early  in  May, ?  7 
wrote  Mr.  Fields ;  ' i  and,  as  our  lodgings 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  117 
were  not  far  apart,  we  were  frequently 
together.  I  recall  many  pleasant  din 
ners  with  him  and  mutual  friends.  .  .  . 
One  of  our  most  royal  times  was  at  a 
parting  dinner  at  the  house  of  Barry 
Cornwall.  Among  the  notables  present 
were  Kinglake  and  Leigh  Hunt.  ...  I 
remember  when  we  went  up  to  the  draw 
ing-room  to  join  the  ladies,  after  dinner, 
the  two  dear  old  poets,  Leigh  Hunt  and 
Barry  Cornwall,  mounted  the  stairs  with 
their  arms  round  each  other  in  a  very 
tender  and  loving  way.  Hawthorne 
often  referred  to  this  scene  as  one  he 
would  not  have  missed  for  a  great  deal." 


VII. 

THE  summer  after  our  arrival  in  Amer 
ica  Hawthorne  passed  quietly  at  "  The 
Wayside/'  in  Concord.  The  house  had 
been  enlarged  and  repaired,  and  was 
much  more  comfortable ;  but,  alas  !  in 
September  Hawthorne  wrote  :  "We  are 
in  great  trouble  on  account  of  our  poor 
Una,  in  whom  the  bitter  dregs  of  that 
Eoman  fever  are  still  rankling,  and  have 
now  developed  themselves  in  a  way 
which  the  physicians  foreboded.  I  do 
not  like  to  write  about  it,  but  will  tell 
you  when  we  meet.  Say  nothing.  I 
am  continually  reminded  nowadays  of 
a  response  I  once  heard  a  drunken  sailor 
make  to  a  pious  gentleman  who  asked 
him  how  he  felt,  '  Pretty  d — d  miserable, 
thank  God  ! ?  It  very  well  expresses  my 
thorough  discomfort  and  forced  acquies 
cence.  " 

With  the  new  year,  1861,  his  daughter 
regained  something  of  her  former  health ; 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE  119 
and  he  seemed  "happy,"  wrote  Mr. 
Fields,  "in  the  dwelling  he  had  put  in 
order  for  the  calm  and  comfort  of  his 
middle  and  later  life." 

Here  he  began  The  DolUver  Bomance, 
"trudging,"  as  he  says,  "to  and  fro  on 
my  hilltop,  but  not  as  yet  with  a  pen 
in  my  hand."  Suddenly,  as  all  great 
calamities  appear  sudden  at  the  first 
stroke,  the  war  broke  out  between  the 
North  and  the  South.  Hawthorne  was 
deeply  agitated,  and  unable  to  continue 
his  work.  He  spoke  jestingly,  some 
times,  saying  he  had  much  to  be  thank 
ful  for  because  Julian  was  too  young 
and  he  was  too  old  to  serve ;  but  his 
heart  was  filled  with  dismay.  Beside, 
his  position  was  a  very  trying  one.  The 
Democratic  party  had  proved  itself  un 
equal  to  seeing  the  right  way  and  walk 
ing  in  it. 

Hawthorne  was  not  unstirred  by  the 
disapprobation  of  his  fellows  nor  desti 
tute  of  sincere  love  for  his  native  land  5 


120  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBKE 
but,  as  he  once  said  in  conversation,  he 
was  not  made  like  Wendell  Phillips, 
who  could  move  like  a  horse  in  blinders 
straight  to  the  end  he  had  in  view.  On 
the  contrary,  it  was  his  fate  to  look  at 
every  side  of  a  question ;  and  he  often 
found  himself  standing  irresolute,  not 
knowing  which  path  to  take.  He  wrote 
from  Washington,  in  1862,  where  Leutze 
painted  a  portrait  of  him  :  "I  see  in  a 
newspaper  that  Holmes  is  going  to  write 
a  song  on  the  sinking  of  the  Cumber 
land;  and,  feeling  it  to  be  a  subject 
of  national  importance,  it  occurs  to  me 
that  he  might  like  to  know  her  present 
condition.  ...  I  did  not  think  it  was  in 
me  to  be  so  moved  by  any  spectacle  of 
the  kind.  Bodies  still  occasionally  float 
up  from  it." 

He  did  not  make  clear  to  himself  how 
near  to  his  heart  and  life  lay  the  condi 
tion  of  the  country.  He  was  torn  by 
dissenting  voices.  Upon  his  return  he 
wrote  a  paper  for  the  Atlantic  Monthly 


KATHAOTEL  HAWTHOBKE  121 

entitled  " Chiefly  about  War  Matters,'' 
a  very  sincere  piece  of  observation  and 
truth -telling.  His  partisan  views  col 
ored  everything,  and  enabled  him  to 
write  a  description  of  Abraham  Lincoln 
which  Mr.  Fields  found  —  like  most 
plain  speaking  in  the  wrong  place  — 
very  undesirable  to  publish.  al  would 
not  speak  of  the  President, ' '  he  wrote  to 
Hawthorne,  "as  ' Uncle  Abe/  but  call 
him  the  President  in  every  instance 
where  he  is  mentioned."  The  result 
was  that  Hawthorne  amiably  left  out  the 
whole  description,  which  may  now  be 
found  in  Yesterdays  with  Authors.  But 
the  description  to-day  is  still  petty. 
When  we  consider  what  Abraham  Lin 
coln  was  to  this  great  people,  we  can 
only  rejoice  that  Hawthorne  was  saved 
from  writing  himself  down  in  that  cru 
cial  epoch  as  one  without  sympathy  for 
his  country's  helper. 

Hawthorne  did  not  know  himself  at 
this  time.      He  loved  Franklin  Pierce, 


122  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE 
but  lie  also  loved  his  other  friends  and 
his  country.  The  sentiment  against 
himself,  so  easily  awakened  in  that  sen 
sitive  era,  reacted  painfully,  and  helped 
to  drive  him  again  back  upon  his  own 
solitude.  The  arrows  of  sorrow,  private 
and  public,  were  striking  deeper  than 
any  one  knew,  even  those  nearest  to 
him.  He  was  only  fifty -nine  years  old 
when  these  griefs  fell  upon  him,  and 
born,  one  would  say  in  looking  upon 
his  noble  figure,  with  the  gift  of  uncom 
mon  physical  strength  ;  but  the  delicacy 
of  his  mental  organization  affected  his 
whole  being.  Longfellow  wrote  of  him 
in  this  later  period,  "  Hawthorne  looks 
gray  and  grand,  with  something  very 
pathetic  about  him." 

His  daughter,  Mrs.  Lathrop,  who  was 
much  younger  than  the  two  elder  chil 
dren,  and  who  never  looked  upon  her 
father  as  a  playmate  and  companion,  as 
they  did,  says:  "I  always  felt  a  great 
awe  of  him, —  a  tremendous  sense  of  his 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE  123 

power.  His  large  eyes,  liquid  with  blue 
and  white  light  and  deep  with  dark 
shadows,  told  me,  even  when  I  was  very 
young,  that  he  was  in  some  respects 
different  from  other  people.  .  .  .  We 
were  usually  a  silent  couple  when  off  for 
a  walk  together,  or  when  we  met  by 
chance  in  the  household.  ...  I  longed 
myself  to  hear  the  splendidly  grotesque 
fairy  tales  .  .  .  which  Una  and  Julian 
had  revelled  in  when  our  father  had 
been  at  leisure  in  Lenox  and  Concord.'7 

This  description  portrays  Hawthorne 
as  he  appeared  to  those  who  knew  him 
only  after  his  youth  had  passed.  The  slim 
athletic  figure,  the  soft  brown  hair,  the 
rapid  movement,  changed  at  a  compara 
tively  early  age ;  and,  though  no  less 
handsome,  he  was  a  large,  slow- moving, 
iron-gray  man,  with  marvellous  dreamful 
eyes.  No  photograph,  and  no  portrait, 
has  ever  done  justice  to  Hawthorne's  eyes. 
They  were  soft  and  kind,  but  in-seeing. 
I  do  not  remember  ever  having  the  irn- 


124  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE 
pression  of  being  looked  at  by  Haw 
thorne.  There  was,  however,  a  very  keen 
sense  of  one's  being  understood  by  him. 
Words  —  speech  —  did  not  seein  to  mat 
ter  much  :  he  understood  as  it  were,  in 
spite  of  the  unsatisfactory  medium  of 
the  tongue ;  and  I  never  heard  him 
talk  but  once  during  four  years  of  inti 
mate  intercourse,  when  he  really  seemed 
to  lay  aside  his  own  painful  self- con 
sciousness  and  speak  because  it  was  a 
pleasure  to  communicate  what  lay  in 
him  to  be  spoken. 

His  wife's  distinguished  gift  was  a 
great  boon  to  him  in  social  ways.  He 
could  turn  the  whole  burden  of  any 
occasion  safely  over  to  her.  He  ap 
peared  to  find  a  genuine  sense  of  repose 
as  he  listened  to  her  somewhat  romantic 
rendering  of  every-day  events,  which 
made  her  a  kind  of  Scheherazade  deal 
ing  with  the  commonplaces  of  ordinary 
life. 

During  the  year  1863  he  was  busied 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOKNE  125 
with  preparing  the  sketches  from  his 
English  note-book  to  be  called  Our  Old 
Home.  " Those  were  troublous  days,77 
wrote  Mr.  Fields  afterwards,  "full  of 
war,  gloom,  and  general  despondency. 
The  North  was  naturally  suspicious  of  all 
public  men  who  did  not  bear  a  con 
spicuous  part  in  helping  to  put  down  the 
Eebellion.  .  .  .  Several  of  Hawthorne's 
friends/7  Emerson,  Longfellow,  Hoar, 
and  others,  "on  learning  that  he  in 
tended  to  inscribe  his  book  to  Franklin 
Pierce,  came  to  me,  and  begged  that  I 
would,  if  possible,  help  Hawthorne  to  see 
that  he  ought  not  to  do  anything  to  jeop 
ardize  the  currency  of  his  new  volume. 
Accordingly,  I  wrote  to  him  just  what 
many  of  his  friends  had  said  to  me  ;  and 
this  is  his  reply  to  my  letter,  which 
bears  the  date  July  18,  1863:  <I 
thank  you  for  your  note  '  of  the  15th 
instant,  and  have  delayed  my  reply 
thus  long  in  order  to  ponder  deeply  on 
your  advice,  smoke  cigars  over  it,  and 


126  NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE 
see  what  it  might  be  possible  for  me  to 
do  towards  taking  it.  I  find  that  it 
would  be  a  piece  of  poltroonery  in  me 
to  withdraw  either  the  dedication  or  the 
dedicatory  letter.  My  long  and  intimate 
relations  with  Pierce  render  the  dedica 
tion  altogether  proper,  especially  as 
regards  this  book,  which  would  have  had 
no  existence  without  his  kindness ;  and, 
if  he  is  so  exceedingly  unpopular  that 
his  name  is  enough  to  sink  the  volume, 
there  is  so  much  the  more  need  that  an 
old  friend  should  stand  by  him.  I  can 
not,  merely  on  account  of  pecuniary 
profit  or  literary  reputation,  go  back 
from  what  I  have  deliberately  felt  and 
thought  it  right  to  do  ;  and,  if  I  were  to 
tear  out  the  dedication,  I  should  never 
look  at  the  volume  again  without  re 
morse  and  shame.  As  for  the  literary 
public,  it  must  accept  my  book  precisely 
as  I  think  fit  to  give  it,  or  let  it 
alone. " 

When  the  book  was  finally  published 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE  127 

in  the  autumn,  there  were  a  great  many 
adverse  criticisms  printed  on  both  sides 
of  the  water.  It  was  not  a  cheering 
reception.  Hawthorne  said  of  it  him 
self:  "It  is  not  a  good  nor  a  weighty 
book,  nor  does  it  deserve  any  great 
amount  either  of  praise  or  censure.  I 
don't  care  about  seeing  any  more  notices 
of  it."  "Meantime,"  continues  Mr. 
Fields,  * i  The  Dolliver  Bomance,  which  had 
been  laid  aside  on  account  of  the  exciting 
scenes  through  which  the  country  was 
then  passing,  and  which  unfitted  him 
for  the  composition  of  a  work  of  the 
imagination,  made  little  progress." 

"I  don't  see  much  probability,"  he 
wrote,  ' '  of  my  having  the  first  chapter  of 
the  romance  ready  so  soon  as  you  want  it. 
There  are  two  or  three  chapters  ready 
to  be  written ;  but  I  am  not  yet  robust 
enough  to  begin,  and  I  feel  as  if  I  should 
never  carry  it  through.  .  .  Those  verses 
entitled  '  Weariness J  in  the  last  magazine 
seem  to  me  profoundly  touching.  I,  too, 


128  NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE 
am  weary,  and  begin  to  look  ahead  for 
the  Wayside  Inn." 

The  crises  of  the  war  and  his  house 
hold  grief  had  affected  him  vitally. 
Mrs.  Hawthorne  wrote  in  November, 
1863:  "On  Tuesday  night  Mr.  Haw 
thorne  was  very  ill.  .  .  .  He  had  been 
so  long  anxious  that  I  feared  typhus,  as 
his  head  was  bad  5  .  .  .  but  he  is  well,  only 
a  little  languid.  He  has  been  on  the 
hill  even.  I  fear  his  coming  back  will 
be  sad.  .  .  .  As  I  was  sitting  by  his  side 
one  day,  I  took  up  the  Confessions  of 
St.  Augustine.  .  .  .  When  we  stand  on 
the  brink  of  a  possible  great  woe,  how 
the  soul  listens  with  new  and  almost 
fierce  attention  and  hunger  for  such 
utterance  as  his."  The  almost  abnor 
mal  sensitiveness  of  her  nature  led  her 
to  foresee  and  to  understand.  She  was 
in  a  sense  "  prepared  "  from  that  hour. 

In  December  Hawthorne  wrote  to  his 
publisher  :  "  I  have  not  yet  had  courage 
to  read  the  Dolliver  proof-sheet,  but  will 


NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE  129 
set  about  it  soon,  though  with  terrible 
reluctance,  such  as  I  never  felt  before.77 
And  in  January,  1864,  he  again  writes 
with  some  depression  about  his  work. 
In  February  he  says  definitely,  "I  can 
not  finish  the  work  unless  a  great  change 
comes  over  me.77 

In  March  he  came  to  our  house  in 
Boston  once  more.  We  were  much 
shocked  by  the  change  in  his  appear 
ance.  He  was  on  his  way  to  Washing 
ton  with  Mr.  Ticknor,  hoping  that  good 
might  result  for  each  from  the  rest  and 
warmer  climate  ;  but  Mr.  Ticknor7  s  sud 
den  death  in  Philadelphia,  the  grief,  and 
difficulty  attendant  upon  their  absence 
from  home,  were  too  much  for  Haw 
thorne  in  his  weak  condition.  He  re 
turned  very  ill.  Early  in  May  General 
Pierce  proposed  to  take  him  in  his 
own  carriage  through  the  lovely  hill 
country  of  New  England.  They  were 
to  meet  in  Boston  and  go  to  Plymouth, 
in  New  Hampshire,  by  rail. 


130  NATHANIEL  HAWTHOBNE 

Hawthorne's  parting  from  his  wife 
and  children  in  Concord  was  full  of 
shadowing  and  unexpressed  misery ; 
and,  when  he  reached  Boston,  it  was 
evident  to  all  his  friends  that  a  change 
had  indeed  fallen  upon  him.  Dr. 
Holmes  wrote,  "  Looking  along  the 
street,  I  saw  a  form  in  advance  which 
could  be  only  his, —  but  how  changed 
from  his  former  port  and  figure  !  "  Yet 
how  impossible  for  any  one  to  prefigure 
his  swift  vanishing !  That  same  night 
Hawthorne  fell  asleep  and  never  woke 
upon  our  world. 

It  was  on  the  morning  of  May  19 
that  General  Pierce  wrote  to  Mr.  Fields, 
after  a  telegram  announcing  Hawthorne's 
death  :  u  He  lies  upon  his  side,  his  posi 
tion  so  perfectly  natural  and  easy  —  his 
eyes  closed  —  that  it  is  difficult  to  realize, 
while  looking  upon  his  noble  face,  that 
this  is  death.  He  must  have  passed  from 
natural  slumber  to  that  from  which  there 
is  no  waking,  without  the  slightest  move 
ment.'7 


NATHANIEL   HAWTHOBNE  131 
The  room  in  which  death  fell  upon 

him, 

"  Like  a  shadow  thrown 
Softly  and  lightly  from  a  passing  cloud, " 

looks  towards  the  east ;  and,  standing  in 
it,  as  I  have  frequently  done  since  he 
passed  out  silently  into  the  skies,  it  is 
easy  to  imagine  the  scene  on  that  spring 
morning. 

uOn  the  24th  of  May  we  carried 
Hawthorne  through  the  blossoming  or 
chards  of  Concord,  and  laid  him  down 
under  a  group  of  pines  on  a  hillside, 
overlooking  historic  fields.  All  the  way 
from  the  village  church  to  the  grave  the 
birds  kept  up  a  perpetual  melody.  The 
sun  shone  brightly  and  the  air  was 
sweet  and  pleasant,  as  if  death  had  never 
entered  the  world.  Longfellow  and  Em 
erson,  Channing  and  Hoar,  Agassiz  and 
Lowell,  Greene  and  "Whipple,  Alcott 
and  Clarke,  Holmes  and  Hillard,  and 
other  friends  whom  he  loved,  walked 
slowly  by  his  side  that  beautiful  spring 


132  tfATHAXIEL  HAWTHOBNE 
morning.  The  companion  of  his  youth 
and  his  manhood,  for  whom  he  would 
willingly  at  any  time  have  given  up  his 
own  life,  Franklin  Pierce,  was  there 
among  the  rest,  and  scattered  flowers 
into  the  grave.  The  unfinished  Ro 
mance,  which  had  cost  him  so  much 
anxiety,  the  last  literary  work  on  which 
he  had  ever  been  engaged,  was  laid  on 
his  coffin.7' 

"  Ah  !  who  shall  lift  that  wand  of  magic 

power, 

And  the  lost  clew  regain! 
The  unfinished  window  in   Aladdin's 

tower 
Unfinished  must  remain.7' 

These  words  of  Mr.  Fields  and  the 
poem  of  Longfellow,  two  friends  whom 
he  sincerely  loved,  still  serve  to-day  as 
the  most  perfect  picture  of  his  burial 
and  the  worthiest  requiem  of  Nathaniel 
Hawthorne. 


BIBLIOGEAPHY. 

The  twelve  volumes  enumerated  below 
for  further  reading  in  the  study  of  Haw 
thorne  are  those  which  have  been  se 
lected  as  at  once  aggregately  the  most 
useful  and  the  most  interesting  among 
the  mass  of  volumes  on  the  subject  that 
has  so  far  been  produced.  No  pretence 
is  here  made  toward  completeness  as 
bibliography.  Magazine  articles  have 
been  entirely  omitted,  no  matter  what 
their  original  value,  since  whatever  they 
contain  can  be  found  practically  repro 
duced  in  book  form. 

I.  ESSAYS  THEOLOGICAL  AND  LITER 
ARY.  Two  volumes.  By  Eichard  Holt 
Hutton.  (London,  1871 :  Strahan  & 
Co. )  The  last  essay  is  an  excellent  liter 
ary  criticism  of  Hawthorne.  It  was  re 
printed  in  the  collection  entitled  Literary 
Essays,  gathered  from  this  series  and 
published  by  Macmillan  &  Co.,  London, 
1888. 


134  BIBLIOGRAPHY 

II.  MEMOIR     OF    NATHANIEL    HAW 
THORNE,    WITH    STORIES   NOW    FIRST 
PUBLISHED  IN  THIS  COUNTRY.    By  Al 
exander  Japp   (H.    A.    Page,    pseud.). 
(London,  1872  :  Henry  S.  King  &  Co. ) 
A  volume  almost  more  historical  than 
critical  and  literary. 

III.  POETS  AND  NOVELISTS  :  A  SERIES 
OF  LITERARY  STUDIES.     By  George  B. 
Smith.  (London,  1875  :  Smith,  Elder  & 
Co.)     This  contains  an  essay  on  Haw 
thorne  from  the  English  standpoint. 

IV.  A  STUDY   OF   HAWTHORNE.    By 
George     Parsons     Lathrop.        (Boston, 
1876:   J.    E.   Osgood  &  Co.)     A  study 
of  the  author,  by  his  son-in-law. 

V.  HAWTHORNE.     By  Henry  James,  Jr. 
(New  York,    1880:    Macmillan  &  Co.) 
An  interesting  volume  in  the  "  English 
Men  of  Letters  "  Series. 

VI.  NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE  AND  HIS 
WIFE.       A    Biography.       By    Julian 


BIBLIOGEAPHY  135 

Hawthorne.  (Boston,  1885:  J.  E.  Os- 
good  &  Co.)  This  book,  by  Haw 
thorne's  son,  is  the  most  complete  and 
intimate  of  all  the  biographies. 

VII.  LIFE     OF     NATHANIEL     HAW 
THORNE.     By  Moncure  Daniel  Conway. 
(London,    1890:     Walter     Scott,    Ltd. 
" Great  Writers"  Series.)     One  of  the 
best  and  most  readable  of  the  series. 

VIII.  PERSONAL    EECOLLECTIONS    OF 
NATHANIEL  HAWTHORNE.     By  Horatio 
Bridge.      (New    York,    1893 :    Harper 
Brothers. )     This  volume  of  reminiscence 
and  appreciation  of  the  author  by  his 
intimate  friend  and  classmate  is  of  great 
interest  to  those  who  desire  to  know 
Hawthorne  as  his  friends  knew  him. 

IX.  LITERARY  SHRINES  :  THE  HAUNTS 
OF  SOME  FAMOUS  AMERICAN  AUTHORS. 
By  Theodore  F.  Wolfe.     (Philadelphia, 
1895  :    J.    B.    Lippincott  &  Co. )     The 
third  essay  is  called  "In  Berkshire  with 
Hawthorne. " 


136  BIBLIOGEAPHY 

X.  THE  THEOLOGY  OF  MODERN  FIC 
TION.  By  T.  G.  Selby.  (London,  1896  : 
Kelly.)  " Nathaniel  Hawthorne/'  is 
the  second  essay. 

XL  MEMORIES  OF  HAWTHORNE.  By 
Eose  Hawthorne  Lathrop.  (Boston, 
1897:  Houghton,  Mifflin  &  Co.)  This 
is  an  interesting  volume  of  biographical 
reminiscence,  with  many  letters  both  of 
Hawthorne  and  his  wife. 

XII.  THE  NEW  ENGLAND  POETS.  By 
William  Cranston  Lawton.  (New  York, 
1898  :  The  Macmillan  Company. )  Haw 
thorne  is  one  of  the  six  subjects  of  this 
critical  volume. 


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